Finally the Maharashtra government has taken the right step to waive farm loans. It was indeed a historic step as farmers had gone on strike in support of their various demands like loan waiver, electricity, pension, minimum support price to all farm produce etc. The decision to announce loan waiver will impose an additional burden of Rs 35,000 crore and the figure is likely to go up as around 1.36 crore farmers have an outstanding loan of Rs 1.14 crore in the state.
Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had formed a committee under the leadership of Chandrakant Patil to look after the various demands of farmers. The committee includes Diwakar Raote of the Shiv Sena, agriculture minister Pandurang Fundkar, finance minister Sudhir Mungantiwar, cooperatives minister Subhash Deshmukh and water resources minister Girish Mahajan. They had an interaction with the farmers delegation and a decision was taken to waive off farm loans. Initially, Fadnavis was not in favour of writing of agricultural loans as he had said that it will impose fiscal burden on the state.
The CM also had added that waiving farm loan will only provide short term relief to farmers and even the government might derive political mileage out of it. He said that it only enables farmers to get rid of their current debt and apply for fresh loan. However, later he had to rethink his decision after farmers had gone on strike few days back. Even opposition parties like Congress, NCP had imposed pressure on the government to waive off farm loans. BJP’s ally Shiv Sena had asked the government to write off farm loans. After the loan waiver was announced Sena also had come forward to take credit for it as it had lauded the efforts of party president Uddhav Thackeray for the outcome.
After the Yogi Adityanath government had written off farm loans amounting to 36,000 crore similar demands were made by farmers in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The government must take steps to revive the agricultural economy. Even though machinery for this exists district and tehsil level officers are there but the government did not empower them. Earlier there was no television and mobile phone in villages but now the lifestyle has changed as people are not satisfied with what they have. At the same time, cost of agricultural production has gone up but income from it has drastically reduced. Farmers must be offered minimum support price by the government. Cold storage must be built to preserve agricultural produce. They must also seek assistance from foreign countries to enhance agricultural output.