Farm loans and their 'waivers': India

From Indpaedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Hindi English French German Italian Portuguese Russian Spanish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content.
You can help by converting these articles into an encyclopaedia-style entry,
deleting portions of the kind nor mally not used in encyclopaedia entries.
Please also fill in missing details; put categories, headings and sub-headings;
and combine this with other articles on exactly the same subject.

Readers will be able to edit existing articles and post new articles directly
on their online archival encyclopædia only after its formal launch.

See examples and a tutorial.

RBI to study UPA-1’s farm loan sop success of 2008

Times of India

Farm.png


New Delhi: The government has initiated a study to ascertain how effectively the farm loan waiver, announced by UPA-1 in 2008, was implemented and whether the ‘aam admi’ actually benefited from the Rs 70,000 crore scheme.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has been asked to provide all related banking data to the government’s auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), which will scan the disbursements made by public sector banks across the country with sample field visits. The opposition parties had alleged that only large farmers and those with perennial credit default history had benefited from the waiver, while the marginal farmers were kept away from any credit facility. “We are examining how effectively the agricultural debt waiver scheme was implemented,” CAG Vinod Rai told reporters in Shimla.

“We do not audit banks as it is done by the RBI and chartered accountants. But we decided to do this audit. So, now, we will look into the books of the banks also,” he added.

The debt waiver scheme was announced in the Union budget 2008-09 and covered all agricultural loans disbursed by commercial banks, regional rural banks and cooperative credit institutions to farmers. According to finance ministry, at least 3.69 crore farmers benefited from the scheme till November 2009. The government has claimed that all eligible farmers were covered.

Andhra Pradesh topped the chart of 35 states and Union Territories (UTs) for having extended the maximum waiver of Rs 11,353 crore with about 77.55 lakh farmers benefiting from the scheme. Till December 2009, various public sector banks had written off Rs 65,318 crore across the country.

Among other states, UP was second in the list of largest disbursements, while Maharashtra came at the third position for having waived more than Rs 8,900 crore to 42 lakh farmers. For bringing more farmers under the credit facility, the government had increased farm credit from Rs 87,000 crore in 2003-04 to Rs 3.25 lakh crore in 2009-10 and also lowered the rate of interest on such loans.

Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Toolbox
Translate