Amarinder urges PM to waive farm debt

Thursday, 15/06/2017

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Chandigarh : Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Wednesday welcomed the Centre’s decision to lower interests on short term crop loans for farmers for the 2017-18 fiscal.

He said this step will substantially alleviate the woes of small and marginal farmers, and urged the prime minister to go all the way to waive the existing farm debts of cultivators.

In a statement issued here after the Union Cabinet’s approval of the Interest Subvention Scheme (ISS) for farmers, Amarinder said the Central government should move forward to waive the loans of at least the small farmers, who were resorting to “extreme measures” to escape their mounting debts.

“The situation is critical,” Amarinder said, claiming that the entire nation was “in the grip of a humanitarian crisis” due to the unrest among the farmers, who had taken to the streets in many states to draw the government’s attention to their plight.

“Caught in a vicious cycle of debt, farmers around the country, including in Punjab, are resorting to suicide,” the chief minister said.

Given the nationwide repercussions, the situation merits urgent intervention by the Centre, he said.

The entire farming community, across states, is in the “grip of a serious financial crisis” as a result of their debt cycles, coupled with low MSP for their produce, the chief minister claimed.

The farmers, who feed the nation, are unable to make both ends meet and they need the government’s support to wade them through the crisis, Amarinder stressed.

The chief minister demanded immediate implementation of the Swaminathan Commission report to fix the MSP to ensure remunerative prices for farm produce, saying the implementation of the recommendations “were the only real solution to the problem in the long run”.

While reiterating his government’s commitment to waive farm loans, as promised by the Congress in its poll manifesto, Amarinder said, “Knee-jerk reactions by individual states, most of which were struggling to cope with the agrarian crisis, could not lead to a permanent resolution of the problem.”

“The central government needs to take a holistic view of the problem from a national perspective and intervene immediately to bring the farming community back from the brink of disaster to the path of development and progress,” the chief minister said.

Amarinder warned that failure to address the issue could lead to a serious food crisis for the country, which could lose its self-sufficiency in food grains and regress to the state in which it was before the green revolution.

Punjab govt to take over loan of farmers: CM

Chandigarh: Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Wednesday said his government will soon take over farmers’ loans and ensure that their mortgaged land or property was not confiscated.

“There is no question of backtracking on the debt waiver promise and the government will soon take over the loans of the farmers. It will also ensure that their mortgaged land/ property is not confiscated,” he said in a statement here.

The CM said his government has already fulfilled the promise to bring an end to ‘kurki’ (auction of mortgaged land) in the state.

Meanwhile, state Cabinet minister Navjot Sidhu said the government was looking for a permanent solution to the problem of farm debts.

“The aim is to make the farmers self-reliant so that they don’t have to take loans in the future,” he said and assured the farmers that the state government would do everything in its power to help them stand on their feet.

Sidhu suggested a licensing system for money lenders to ensure a fair and just system of taking loans in case of dire necessity.