Not benefiting from loan waiver, Muzaffarnagar farmer commits suicide

A month after the Yogi Adityanath government announced a loan waiver package for farmers in UP, Suresh, a middle-aged farmer in Rohana area of Muzaffarnagar, committed suicide on Tuesday apparently because he was depressed due to the money he owed to the local bank. Suresh's nephew Shivam said that Suresh was depressed as he had taken a loan of Rs. 3 lakh from the Rohana branch of Allahabad Bank which he had been unable to pay.

“My uncle was in depression due to the farm loan he had taken a few years ago. He was extremely happy when the Adityanath government announced a farm loan waiver. But what sent him into depression was when he found out that he would not benefit from the waiver due to some technical grounds,” Shivam told the media.

“The local district officials and those from the bank had apparently told him that farm loan waiver would not rescue him at all from the loan he had taken few years ago. This worry had been eating him up from within. On Tuesday he just got up, went into his room, and shot himself in his head. We were shocked because we did not expect that he would commit suicide,” he added. The doctors at the district hospital declared him brought dead.

Sudhir Panwar, a farmers activist who hails from the nearby district of Shamli, told The Hindu that Suresh's suicide pointed towards the biggest problem with the farm loan waiver as conceptualised by the Adityanath government. He said the amount of loan waiver worth Rs 30,729 crore does not match the total amount of loan taken by farmers.

“The amount of loan taken by the farmers in the State and the amount which has been waived off by the State government does not match, which raises questions about the exact benefits that the farmers will get. Moreover, giving only a section of the farmers the benefit when the entire sector is going through an acute crisis is a complete betrayal of the promise the Prime Minister made to the farmers of the State. I think the State government had taken the decision more with the 2019 general election in mind than the acute crisis the farmers of the State faced,” Panwar, a former member of the UP Planning Commission, told The Hindu.