The State government will keep track of Primary Agricultural Cooperative Society (PACS) managements that have clandestinely availed crop loans from banks in the name of farmers without the latter’s knowledge and used it for other purposes.
Sources said the CB-CID, which is investigating the cases, had been authorised to attach properties of the accused at the preliminary stage itself.
A verification of the database of crop loan accounts submitted by banks found up to one lakh fraudulent crop loan accounts, and majority of them pertained to PACS.
In Kadapa, the chairman and directors of two PACS availed loans to the tune of Rs. 3 crore in the name of farmers. The baffled farmers approached the District Collector when the list cleared by the government showed them as eligible for loan waiver when they had not actually availed loans.
The government directed the APCOB to freeze such accounts and conduct an inquiry. Incidentally, the loans availed by District Cooperative Central Banks account for Rs. 6,600 crore in the State.
Meanwhile, the government has requested the Telangana government to give it access to the database to verify the identity of borrowers who reside in Telangana after availing crop loans in Andhra Pradesh, as it will help farmers who could not make it to the eligible list in the first phase.
Incidentally, crop loan borrowers, in accordance with the guidelines of the debt redemption scheme, had to submit their Aadhar card numbers, ration cards and voter ID numbers as proof of identity. The software programme rejected those with Aadhaar numbers registered in Telangana for debt relief, as they could not be verified.
The Aadhaar registration was done in the combined State, but after bifurcation, the databases of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were separated. When the issue was taken up with the National Informatics Centre, it directed the government to coordinate with the Telangana State for verification of such Aadhaar numbers. If the verification is done before January 9, such accounts will also be included in the first phase of debt redemption.
Govt. opens call centresThe government has opened three call centres with numbers 1100, 1800 425 4440 and 1800 103 2066, and the lines in each centre have been increased to 47 to speed up the grievance re-dressal process. So far 7,730 grievances have been received from borrowers, with the maximum number from West Godavari district with 1,752 and the minimum from Visakhapatnam with 11.
