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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Telangana is Proof Farm Loan Waivers Aren't a Long-Term Solution -Siraj Hussain

Telangana is Proof Farm Loan Waivers Aren't a Long-Term Solution -Siraj Hussain

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published Published on Dec 29, 2018   modified Modified on Dec 29, 2018
-TheWire.in

The government has to evolve policies suitable to a particular state and fine-tune them according to local needs.

‘Nothing succeeds like success,’ first written by Sir Arthur Helps in Realmah in 1868, is going to guide political parties while they draft manifestos for the next parliamentary election. It seems that the Rythu Bandhu (RB) scheme – also known as the Telangana model of direct investment support (DIS) to farmers – has caught the imagination of our politicians. Odisha and Jharkhand have already announced a modified and improved version of this scheme while teams from various states have been visiting Telangana to study the RB model – a welfare programme to support farmer’s investment for two crops a year.

But did the RB model alone help the Telangana Rashtriya Samiti (TRS) sweep the recent assembly elections?

Farm loan waiver

In its manifesto, the TRS promised to waive farm loans of up to Rs 1 lakh. In fact, in the 2014 assembly elections also, the party had made a similar promise. The outstanding crop loans in 2013-14 were about Rs 14,897 crore. Initially, the government did not want to include loans taken against gold or gold jewellery, post-harvest loans and the ones to tobacco and sugarcane farmers.

However, due to widespread protest by farmers, all these were included in the write-offs and finally, the government paid Rs 16,124 crore to fulfil its promise. This is estimated to have benefitted nearly 36 lakh farmers. But due to budgetary constraints, the loan waiver was done in four instalments spread over 2017-18.

The fresh promise of loan waiver, made in the 2018 TRS manifesto in Telangana, is estimated to cost the state Rs 24,000 crore. So it is not Rythu Bandhu alone which likely influenced rural voters to side with the TRS.

A question thus arises: why could the Rs 16,124-crore waiver not achieve its objective of making farmers debt free? Also, how will a waiver of another Rs 24,000 crore make their farming viable?

Rythu Bandhu scheme

The state government undertook a massive exercise of updating land records for the implementation of the Rythu Bandhu scheme. Teams of officers from the revenue and agriculture departments visited over 10,800 villages and verified 72.13 lakh land titles in order to free them from litigation. As part of the scheme, the state spent a total of Rs 12,000 crore during Kharif and Rabi seasons – Rs 4,000 per acre was given to land-owning farmers for each cropping season, irrespective the of size of land holding.

Refusing to learn from Punjab’s water crisis – which was aggravated due to free electricity – the Telangana government also announced that free power would be made available to farmers starting January 1, 2018.

Please click here to read more.

TheWire.in, 27 December, 2018, https://thewire.in/agriculture/telangana-farm-loan-waivers


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