Four crore. That is the number of debt-ridden small and marginal farmers that the Government has sought to provide relief to through the proposed agricultural loan waiver. But recent statistics paint a more modest picture of the actual impact of the proposed Rs 60,000 crore loan write-off.
In reality, just over a fifth of small and marginal farmers who have outstanding loans may get some respite from the scheme, having borrowed from the banking system. The rest continue to be vulnerable to indebtedness and suicides, since informal sources like moneylenders, friends and family have been their primary source of obtaining credit.
This could be one reason why in the one month since the loan waiver was announced in the Union Budget, 56 farmers still chose to end their lives. The scheme had little or no impact on them, claimed Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav recently. It is also an indication that many of the most vulnerable farmers do not qualify for any benefits under the proposed loan waiver.
This was the case of 32-year old Sukhvinder Singh, who, unable to repay the Rs 7 lakh he had borrowed from banks and moneylenders, decided to end his life. Or like 34-year old Ramchandra Wate, a farmer in Wadha, who killed himself because he owed just over Rs 20,000 to a bank. Ironically, Wate’s family will get no benefit from the loan waiver since they own six acres of land—one acre more than the land-holding norm that qualifies a farmer as small and marginal.
Figures from a survey by Dataworks, an arm of the Delhi-based Invest India Market Solutions, reinforces this ground reality. They reveal that of the total number of small farmers who borrowed over the last two years, more than three-fourths approached informal channels. The highest number (36 per cent) of small farmers went to moneylenders for loans, while friends and relatives (32 per cent) proved to be the second best bet.
For the families of these farmers and many others to whom the Sunday Express spoke, the impact of loan waiver has been either nil, or largely negligible. For this lot, the loan write-off is just another one of the many schemes that never benefit them.
— Zeenat Nazir

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