Akali Dal slams Punjab farm loan waiver, says ruling party is 'defrauding farmers'

Chandigarh: A day after Punjab’s Congress government launched its farm debt-waiver scheme, the opposition Shiromani Akali Dal on Monday accused the ruling party of defrauding farmers by waiving only a part of their loan. “Debt-waiver (scheme) is a massive fraud with the farming community. There cannot be a bigger fraud than this,” SAD president Sukhbir Badal told reporters. The opposition party has decided to meet Punjab Governor VP Singh Badnore on 12 January, seeking the dismissal of the Amarinder Singh government. It will also hold a meeting of the core committee of the party on the same day on the issue. In Mansa district on Sunday, Singh launched his government’s farm debt waiver scheme and slammed opposition parties for spreading a “false propaganda”. [caption id=“attachment_4293471” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File image of Sukhbir Singh Badal. AFP[/caption] Farm debt waiver was one of the key promises of the Congress ahead of the state polls in February last year. Badal said that Singh had promised before the Assembly polls that the “entire debt” of all farmers would be waived. The total amount of debt is about Rs 90,000 crore, he said. “But Captain Sahib waived just Rs 167 crore for 47,000 farmers on Sunday. It worked out to be an average of Rs 35,000 per farmer,” he said, referring to Singh. Badal also raised questions on the functioning of the two commissions — Justice Ranjit Singh Commission and Justice Mehtab Singh Gill Commission — formed by the Congress government to probe cases of sacrilege and look into the “false cases” registered during the decade-long SAD-BJP rule. He asked the government to appoint a sitting judge of the Supreme Court to look into the matters. Punjab Congress chief Sunil Jakhar on Sunday reportedly accused the SAD of being behind the incidents of sacrilege. “The commission has not given any verdict and Jakhar has been making wrong statements,” he said.