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New Delhi, June 12
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Monday that state governments will have generate its own funds to waive farmers’ loans, a statement that is likely to cause trouble for states like Maharashtra.
Jaitley said that the state governments that decide to waive such loans would have to dip into their own reserves, reasoning Centre’s intervention in one state will lead to demands from others.
“I have already made the position clear that states which want to go in for these kind of schemes (farm loan waivers) will have to generate them from their own resources. Beyond that the central government has nothing more to say,” Jaitley said, responding to a question about Maharashtra’s decision to waive farm loans.
The development comes months after BJP’s own chief minister, Uttar Pradesh’s Adityanath, announced that his government would waive farm loans.
Jaitley’s announcement could spell trouble in states that are already seeing violent protests by farmers, such as Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.
This isn’t the first time Jaitley has voiced his reluctance to intervene in loan waiver.
“This issue (loan waiver) has cropped up in several states. The Centre has its policies for agriculture sector under which we provide interest subvention and other support. We will continue to give all that.”
“If a state has its own resources and want to go ahead in that direction, it will have to find its resources. The situation where the Centre will help one state and not the others will not arise,” Jaitley had told Parliament in the last session.
BJP leaders also expect the issue to “die down”. Farmers, party leaders claim, are “well aware of the reality and the Prime Minister’s intentions,” they argue.
But two years to go for the general elections, the problem may last longer than the BJP-led Centre may have envisaged. For one thing, anyone with some knowledge of the issue will have to acknowledge that agrarian distress and the problems that plague small and marginal farmers are real, say experts.
For another, although Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government claims a range of measures to boost agriculture and farmers’ income, critics say that these have not percolated to the bottom because of high input costs of production that make the profession unviable.
Then there is the MSP issue (the BJP-led Centre has not implemented the Swaminathan commission formula of C2+50 per cent despite promising so in the manifesto) and the central government’s decision to demonetise high-value currency that have to the woes of farmers recovering from two consecutive years of drought, both of which remain contentious issues.
One view also is that agrarian states should design their specific long-term policy measures to alleviate problems of their farmers.
Government functionaries claim that overall country production has gone up (India is in for a record production this year), “only farmers of some districts of Maharashtra and MP” suffered because of lower output.
The BJP may blame the violent protests on the Congress, the fact is Adityanath government’s decision served as a trigger for similar demands across the country. To some, the farmers — the biggest vote bank spanning across castes and religions — have a case keeping in mind the track record of past governments — that is, helping troubled industries. And as general elections, as well as several tests in between — assembly elections — their case may have just become stronger.
