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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Without Rise in Farm Income, Congress' Loan Waivers Won't End Rural Distress -Kabir Agarwal

Without Rise in Farm Income, Congress' Loan Waivers Won't End Rural Distress -Kabir Agarwal

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published Published on Dec 20, 2018   modified Modified on Dec 20, 2018
-TheWire.in

Implementing the loan waiver in Chhattisgarh, MP and Rajasthan will not be easy. It will cost Rs 80,000 crore and might need the states to double the spending on agriculture.

New Delhi:
On Monday, the newly appointed chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Kamal Nath, proudly announced that his first executive decision was to waive farm loans in the state.

While campaigning for the assembly elections, the Congress party had promised that if voted to power, it would waive farm loans within 10 days. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Rahul Gandhi gloated over the fact that this was done within six hours in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, with Rajasthan to follow soon.

But implementation is not going to be easy. According to Reserve Bank of India estimates in 2017, loan waivers in these three states could cost around Rs 41,000 crores. But, that estimate is at the lower end, since it considers loans waived up to Rs 1 lakh and uses indebtedness estimates of March 2016.

The Congress in Madhya Pradesh has already announced that it will be waiving loans up to Rs 2 lakh, which will cost in excess of Rs 35,000 crore. The Chhattisgarh government has announced that the waiver in the state could cost around Rs 6,000 crore. In Rajasthan, the waiver is expected to cost even more than in MP, as levels of indebtedness are higher. All told, farm loan waivers in these three states could end up costing in excess of Rs 80,000 crore.

The three governments will have little room to manoeuvre as fiscal deficits are already more than 2.8% of gross state domestic product (GSDP) in all these states. The figure for MP is as high as 3.3%. Clearly, spending will have to be lowered in certain areas.

To put the sums involved into perspective, MP’s budgeted expenditure on agriculture for the year 2018-19 was Rs 37,000 crore – only slightly higher than the amount the loan waiver is going to cost. To ensure that spending on other aspects of agriculture does not go down, the MP government will have to double its spending on agriculture.

Addressing rural distress

That would mean drastically reducing spending in other areas such as manufacturing and services. In a state that suffers from a serious shortage of jobs, this will not be an easy trade off.

Even if the precariousness of implementing a farm loan waiver is kept aside, it is worth analysing whether the move will actually address the issue of rural distress in India.

The distress, in large parts, is because of declining incomes. A working paper published by the RBI in April 2018 noted that rural wage growth has shown a significant declining trend since 2014. The paper also pointed out that, at times, real rural wage growth was negative, which means that after accounting for inflation, wages actually declined between two time periods.

Loan-waivers are not designed to solve the low income problem. If governments are unable to ensure that rural incomes go up, rural indebtedness could soon be back at the same level where it stands now. Loan waivers will be necessary once again, and the cycle will be repeated.

Social scientist Yogendra Yadav, who is also one of the leaders of the farmers movement in the country, says that loan waivers in isolation are not enough. “Loan waivers are necessary, but not sufficient. If they are the only measure the government is taking, then I will not support that. The Congress government in all these states needs to take proactive measures to provide income support to farmers. Without that, loan waivers won’t be effective,” he told The Wire.

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TheWire.in, 19 December, 2018, https://thewire.in/agriculture/without-an-increase-in-farm-incomes-loan-waivers-wont-end-agrarian-distress


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