On the initiative of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, National Agriculture and Rural Development Bank (NABARD) has approved Madhya Pradesh’s proposal for norms of survey of crop loss farmer-wise instead of Anawari for the first time in the country and also consented to proposal to suspend loan recovery from affected-farmers and issue them fresh loans. Calamity-affected farmers in the State have got a major relief due to this decision. Crop loss will now be assessed farmer-wise instead of Anawari.
With special reference to Madhya Pradesh, NABARD has changed norms for loan recovery from hailstorm-affected farmers during Rabi 2015. It is the first occasion in India. Through it, short-term loans of farmers whose over 50 per cent crops has suffered loss would be converted to medium-term.
Besides, the State Government had also converted short-term loans of farmers who had availed loans from cooperative banks to medium term for years 2013-14 and 2014-15 as per norms of Reserve Bank. For this, the State Government has given loan guarantee of Rs4.74 crore to NABARD. Rs105 crore has been made available to District Cooperative Banks as state share. Besides, an order has also been issued that interest should be zero per cent on loans suspended for next 3 years. In this way, the Chief Minister has fulfilled announcements made by him earlier.
Notably, on special initiative of Chouhan, the State Government had given a proposal to NABARD Chairman to convert individual loans of farmers from short to medium-term. The State Government informed the NABARD Chairman that it is difficult to assess real crop loss even through Anawari method and crop cutting experiment.