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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Is loan waiver a panacea for rural distress? -Nilanjan Banik

Is loan waiver a panacea for rural distress? -Nilanjan Banik

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published Published on May 31, 2018   modified Modified on May 31, 2018
-Financial Express

Loan waivers adversely affect marginal farmers due to a reduction of formal credit channels given to them

On the eve of the Karnataka election, waivers of farm loans were one of the major election promises. Now, chief minister HD Kumaraswamy wants to fulfill his pre-poll promise and even threatened to resign if he cannot fulfill his promise. As has been seen time and time again, “farmers first” provides political mileage. With more than 55% of Indians earning their livelihood from the agricultural sector, it comes as no surprise that political parties like to place their bets on the farmers’ cause. However, the real benefit to the farmers won’t come from loan waivers.

We studied responses to farmer distress in Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan (Farmer Distress: An Analysis of Intervention in Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, India Consensus Report, 2018). Of the two states, farmer distress appears more pronounced in Andhra Pradesh, which has one of the highest national rates of farmer suicides, at 47 per 1,000 population, between 2010 and 2012. Nationally, in 2012 -15, over 10,000 farmers committed suicide.

Last year, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Punjab undertook large-scale farm debt waivers, costing 0.5% of the GDP of India, and Andhra Pradesh recently announced a loan-waiver costing Rs 24,000 crore. However, our study and other academic literature, finds that a loan waiver scheme costs about as much as it achieves. Moreover, it mostly helps richer and bigger farmers, leaving smaller farmers worse-off in the future.

Only 15% of the marginal farmers (with less than 1 hectare of landholding), have access to formal credit, so a loan waiver helps them little. In fact, previous waivers have led to banks reducing credit outlay for small farmers during their next loan cycle, thereby diminishing their chances of getting formal loans. Loan waivers actually do harm to the small farmers, as with less credit outlay from the formal sector, the small farmers increasingly have to depend upon the informal sector. The cost difference for loan rates between the formal and informal sectors vary between 30-45%, annually.

In terms of generating a benefit-cost ratio, our work for Andhra Pradesh shows that waiving formal loans for land holders with less than two hectares would cost Rs 24,860 crore. The benefits will be slightly lower at Rs 24,629 crore. Giving out a rupee to achieve just 99 paise of benefit is a poor deal. It also means a 15% reduction in smallholder credit over the following years, cutting revenue for the most vulnerable farmers by 13.5%. Importantly, spending thousands of crores on less effective policies leaves less for much more effective ones. The benefit-cost ratio for Rajasthan also yields a value of less than one, suggesting that the undertaking of loan waiver programs does not make sense at all.

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Financial Express, 30 May, 2018, https://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/is-loan-waiver-a-panacea-for-rural-distress/1186067/


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