Kalagara Muralikrishna, a small farmer from Pamulavarigudem of West Godavari district, who ‘defaulted’ on repayment of a bank loan, is now praying for some miracle to happen when the jewellery he had pledged with the bank will be auctioned. He is one of the 30-odd farmers from five Agency mandals who have received notices from the Darbhagudem branch of the Bank of India (BoI) for a public auction of their gold pledged with the bank against crop loans.
Debt trap“Even no private money lender would give us loans once the auction takes place,” says Muralikrishna, citing that the auction notice had been published in a newspaper. He pledged five sovereigns of gold that he had gifted his two daughters during their marriage with the bank to obtain a loan of Rs. 30,000. He invested the money in maize cultivation. He suffered losses as the crops were damaged by heavy gales and he failed to repay the loan. Erratic power supply and lack of irrigation water took a heavy toll on his sugarcane crop in the subsequent years and he never recouped from the debt-trap.
Mr. Muralikrishna appealed to Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu to bail him and the other farmers out from the problem by implementing the loan waiver. Similar is the case of Boddu Rambabu of Swarnavarigudem, who had borrowed Rs.11,000 form the bank. K. Nagendranath, Branch Manager of the BoI, said that he had to comply with the instructions from his Zonal Office. “As we have not received any guideline on loan waiver so far, I can’t afford sitting over the mounting overdue,” he said. According to officials , the district has recorded outstanding overdue of Rs 3,000 crore in agriculture gold loans, while the same for crop loans stood at Rs 10,000 crore.
