After Ladli Bahna, State Govt readies blueprint for peasant-friendly scheme
| Date :24-Apr-2023 |
Bhavana ‘Aparajita’ Shukla
As Assembly elections are nearing, Shivraj Singh Chouhan-led BJP government has readied a blueprint of a peasant-friendly scheme to dole out some financial support to the community like that is promised under recently launched ‘Ladli Bahna Yojana’. Being the second largest wheat growers’ community in the country, Madhya Pradesh farmers are facing twin-problem of unseasonal weather and tardy wheat procurement process. Highly-placed sources informed ‘The Hitavada’ that State Government would soon launch the scheme that would mainly focus on chipping in some financial support that would ease financial strain on farmers. However, final draft of the scheme has yet not come out of the drawing board as some riders are to be added to it. The sources further informed that the scheme is tailor-made for those farmers who fall in marginal farmer bracket and are saddled with an agri-loan burden of Rs two lakh obtained exclusively from any primary co-operative society. Once the scheme is launched as many as 1.1 million peasants will be able to reap benefits in form of interest-payment waiver.
An additional financial burden of Rs 2,415 crore is likely on state exchequer, said the sources. Interestingly, the debt-ridden State Government will have to arrange the additional whopping funds obviously from market borrowing.
A platoon of senior officers and few cabinet colleagues of chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan are busy in christening the scheme. In 2018, the main opposition Congress had successfully made farmer loan waiver its poll plank and clinched the power from 15-years old BJP government. And, soon after taking reigns from his predecessor, the then Chief Minister Kamal Nath completed the maiden obligatory task of waiving farm loans up to Rs 2 lakh for all eligible farmers. It is believed that Rahul Gandhi was the architect of the farm-loan waiver scheme and asked Kamal Nath to incorporate it in the then election manifesto. Rahul Gandhi had also made promise to farmers during his 2018 whirlwind election campaign.
Later, he had pat on Kamal Nath’s back and tweeted: “1 done, 2 to go”. The Kamal Nath-led Congress government had passed an order saying, “The Madhya Pradesh government has decided to waive loans up to Rs 2 lakh of farmers who were found eligible, taken from nationalised and co-operative banks as short-term crop loan as on March 31, 2018.” However, he could not hold the power for a long time and lost it to Chouhan again. Last year, while addressing a farmers gathering in Bhopal under the aegis of the ‘Bharatiya Kisan Sangh,’ Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced that the state government will share the burden of the interest accrued on farm loans of farmers who were unable to repay their loans due to the ‘loan waiver scheme’ launched by the previous Congress government. It would be interesting to see, how the government would launch, implement and execute the scheme in hot-haste manner as code of conduct that take effects few months before election, is only a few months away.