Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president Sukhbir Badal on Friday demanded to scrap the “fraudulent” crop loan waiver and replace it with a comprehensive waiver covering all indebted farmers saying that the Congress-led Punjab Government was playing with the lives of farmers by proposing to implement a loan waiver which left out genuine beneficiaries.
“Nearly 400 farmers have committed suicide after the Government failed to implement the promised Rs 90,000 loan waiver covering cooperative and nationalized banks as well as private money lenders,” said Sukhbir.
He added that now an even more dangerous trend was in the offing after the suicide of a farmer from lehragaga in Sangrur who took his life after finding out his name was not in the beneficiary list.
Asserting that the Congress Government and its legislators were responsible for the death of lehragaga farmer Sikander Singh, Sukhbir said that this had happened because Congressmen had vitiated the entire exercise by resorting to corruption which had left lakhs of deserving beneficiaries out of the ambit of the current crop loan waiver scheme.
“The present scheme is only for crop loans which have a traditional recovery percentage of 95 per cent,” he said.
Stating that indebted farmers would not to tolerate this injustice, Sukhbir asked them to gherao Congress legislators and Ministers to get their
just due.
“The Government’s repeated betrayals on this issue have left farmers with no other choice,” he said adding that the SAD would also launch a protest movement against this injustice.
Sukhbir said that besides cherry picking of beneficiaries at the hands of Congressmen, for which bribes were also being exchanged, the Government was also denying the loan waiver to those who needed it most.
“Small farmers with less than five acres of land are being denied this waiver if their debt amount is Rs 1 more than Rs 2 lakh. Similarly, marginal farmers with less than 2.5 acres of land are also being kept out of the ambit of the scheme. No relief had been given to farm labourers,” he said.
SAD chief said that many beneficiaries who had been given relief between Rs 100 and a few thousand had been deliberately included in the scheme to inflate the beneficiary list in order to deceive the farming community.
Demanding an independent inquiry into the entire scam which was being touted as a loan waiver, Sukhbir said that it was shameful that Congressmen were making money out of the misery of farmers.
Demanding an inquiry into this sordid scandal, he said that this case should be handed over to an independent agency as the Congress Government could not be trusted to take action against its own legislators who were behind the scam.