Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Thursday announced that his Government would launch a mobile app in the next two days to help farmers submit application forms seeking loan waiver under its recently announced scheme “Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Krishi Samman Yojana”.
Replying to a debate on the implementation of the loan waiver scheme, Fadnavis said in the State Assembly: “We have set up as many 26,000 facilitation centres across the State to fill and accept loan waiver forms both online and offline. In addition to these centres, we will launch a mobile app in the next two days to help farmers submit forms seeking loan waiver online”.
Fadnavis said that the State Government would complete in September the first phase of farm loan waiver scheme involving Rs 34,022 crore relief package for debt-trapped farmers in the State, announced by it on June 24 this year.
“After we receive the forms, we need at least one month scrutinise them. We will not be giving money to various banks towards loan waiver. We will be depositing the money directly to the accounts of the beneficiary farmers so that they clear the debts on their own and become credit worthy once again,” the Chief Minister said.
Dismissing the Opposition’s criticism that the State Government had made the loan waiver procedure cumbersome by seeking application forms for the purpose from the farmers. Fadnavis said: “ We are accepting application forms to ensure against any mis-appropriation of money in the loan waiver procedure. The application form is very simple. It is a two-page document seeks basic information from the farmers like name, Aadhaar number, PAN number (if available), public provident fund number (if available), mobile number, date of birth and a signature”.
Fadnavis said that the farmers, whose loans were restructured in 2016 would be covered under the waiver scheme, up to a cap of Rs 1.5 lakh.
“ In addition to a committee set up by the State Government to monitor the implementation of the scheme, we are ready to constitute a committee of members from all parties for smooth and systematic implementation of farmer loan waiver,” the Chief Minister said.
“We announced loan waiver to make our farmers credit worthy and bring back them into institutional credit system...... We found that around 44 lakh farmers are by &large out of the institutional credit system due to many reasons since many years,” the Chief Minister said.