Farm loan waiver implementation in Maharashtra slow due to delayed data submission by banks, say officials

Mumbai: The implementation of Maharashtra government’s loan waiver scheme has been slow due to delay in submission of data by banks of the beneficiary farmers and its verification, officials said. The banks have not yet submitted lists of nearly two lakh farmers who could benefit from the scheme, an official from the state cooperation department said on Thursday. [caption id=“attachment_4201433” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. AFP[/caption] Some public, private and district cooperative banks have not yet furnished data of the potential beneficiaries to the cooperation department, because of which the process of their verification and finalisation is yet to be done, another government official said. “The pending list is of a few lakhs of farmers. Unless the list is submitted, the entire loan waiver scheme cannot go ahead. The rule, like selecting only one beneficiary from a family, cannot be implemented effectively because the complete list of farmers with outstanding loans is not yet available, he said. “What we have are lists of farmers given by some banks. But the number of farmers who registered on (the government’s) ‘Aapale Sarkar’ portal is more than the current lists submitted by banks,” an official from the state information technology department said. “As the lists of some banks are yet to be submitted, the state is on a slow track in implementing the loan waiver scheme,” the official said. The department is cross-checking the farmers’ claims submitted on the portal with the data provided by the banks. The state government had announced a Rs 34,022 crore farm loan waiver scheme in June this year. It had last month released a sum of Rs 4,000 crore under the first phase of the scheme.