Telangana Government has announced that the crop loan waiver assured up to ₹2 lakh will be applicable to short term loans obtained from scheduled commercial banks, regional rural banks and district cooperative banks.
Loan waiver will be applicable to loans sanctioned/renewed between December 12, 2018 and December 12 last year. Family of each farmer will be eligible for waiver up to ₹2 lakh and this includes the principal and interest due as of December 12 last year. The State Government has issued the detailed guidelines on the applicability of ‘Loan Waiver 2024’to farmers on Monday.
Accordingly, the eligibility of farmers would be based on the database of food security cards issued by the Civil Supplies department. The commissioner and director of Agriculture department would be the nodal officer for implementation of the scheme for which the Hyderabad-based National Informatics Centre would be the IT partner.
Exclusive portal for effective implementation
An IT portal would be created exclusively by the Agriculture department and the NIC for effective implementation of the scheme. The portal would contain details of loan account data of eligible farmers and the eligibility of farmers would be decided after data validation by the departments concerned. The portal would be linked with the IFMIS system operated by the Finance department for submission of bills and it would also have modules for sharing information with the stakeholders and receiving complaints from farmers.
The banks had been instructed to attach the reference-1 memo of their core banking solution to the prescribed proforma-1 and submit the same to the Government with digital signature of the official concerned. Likewise, the Primary Agriculture Cooperative Societies should should attach reference-2 of the bank branches concerned with proforma-2 and submit the same to the Government. In order to minimise the scope for wrong entries, the Government had mandated validation checks by the Agriculture Commissioner on the NIC database and the information should be submitted to the Government as it is.
Steps should be taken to match the Aadhar data of the pattadar pass books with that of the PDS database to map the eligible farmers’ families. The identified families would be eligible for a cumulative benefit of ₹2 lakh waiver under the scheme. The amounts for eligible families would be transferred into the loan accounts of the eligible farmers in direct benefit transfer mode.
In case of Primary Agriculture Co-operative Society (PACS), the loan waiver amounts would be credited to the respective District Co-Operative Central Bank (DCCB) or the bank branches concerned and the bank branches would in turn credit the loan waiver amount into the accounts of the farmers. According to the guidelines, the loan waiver amounts should be credited into farmers accounts based on the amounts due till Dec 12, 2023 in ascending order and the each family would get benefit of loans up to the same date or ₹2 lakh, whichever is lesser.
Guideline for loans in excess of ₹2lakh
In case of farmers having loans in excess of ₹2 lakh, loans obtained by the woman in the family would be waived first and the balance loans taken in the name of male members would be waived proportionately.
The crop loan waiver would not be applicable for loans taken by Self-Help Groups (SHGs), Joint Liability Group (JLGs), Rythu Mithra Groups (RMG) and LICS. Loan waiver would also be not applicable for rescheduled and re-structured loans as also for loans obtained by companies and firms except for the loans obtained from the PACS.
Interestingly, the State Government said exemptions given under the PM Kisan would be factored in on the basis of available data for making the implementation of the scheme practicable.
The Government had fixed responsibility for the banks in that they should dutifully submit the data (proforma-I and II) to the Government. Steps should be taken to ensure that eligibility of farmers and factual details of the loans obtained by them was given in a comprehensive manner. The digital signature of the nodal officer concerned of the banks was a must on all documents pertaining to loan waiver as well as the lists prepared by the banks for the scheme.
Farmers, on their part, should provide factual information pertaining to loan they had obtained failing which the Commissioner and Director of Agriculture would be empowered with provisions to legally recover the amounts from them. The Cooperation department director and registrar of cooperative societies should conduct a pre-audit sample to verify the factual information of the data available with the PACS and submit the same to the Agriculture department.
The Government said it reserved the right to conduct audit of the accounts of beneficiary farmers in accordance with the procedures prescribed by the RBI/NABARD while it could also conduct the audit through statutory or special auditors.
30 days deadline to redress grievances
The Agriculture department had been directed to set up a special cell for grievance redressal wherein farmers would register their complaints through the IT portal or help centres set up at the mandal level. The officials concerned were set a deadline of 30 days for redressing the grievances received from farmers.
