Farmers greet waiver with scepticism, joy, anger

The Rs 60,000-crore loan waiver for small farmers has not exactly sent farming communities in the country into transports of joy, a dipstick survey by Business Standard correspondents, each of whom interviewed 25 to 30 farmers across India, shows.

Some farmers, notably in Orissa, are moderately happy to have debts of Rs 5,000 written off. Others who benefit from a write-off of as much as Rs 77,000 are worried about how much they'll have to bribe to access the waiver.

And there is bitterness among farmers who have been left out of the bounty owing to the size of their land-holdings "" the waiver is for farmers with holdings of one or two hectares (2.5 to 4 acres) "" or because they have borrowed from money-lenders and other informal sources.

Harvinder Singh of Kanoi village in Sangrur district of Punjab has only two acres. But then, he and his four brothers have their individual farms in a single consolidated holding in their father's name.

This apart, he has taken a loan of Rs 80,000 from a money-lender. In other words, he is a small, indebted farmer of the kind the government wants to benefit "" but he is outside the purview of the largesse.

Indeed, according to Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, nearly 80 per cent of the farmers in 1 million holdings in Punjab will be outside the ambit of the biggest loan waiver in Indian fiscal history.

Business Standard spoke to 25 farmers in three villages in Sangrur and found that just 4 out of 25 farmers benefit from the waiver.

In Chhattisgarh's Kawardha district in Dharampuri village, 140 km from capital city Raipur, the problem of size repeats itself. There are joint ownerships of land and the waiver would not benefit such holdings which form the majority in the area.

"The waiver announcement elated the farmers at first. But disappointment followed as the government drew the line between small and big farmers," said Ramu Chandravanshi, the deputy village head who owns 20 acres of ancestral land and owes cooperative banks Rs 45,000.

"To get the benefits in the future, big farmers holding joint lands have to disintegrate the family and divide the property," said Bhuneshwar Chandravanshi, who owns 35 acres of joint property in Birkoni and owes a cooperative bank Rs 45,000.

The story in Haryana is a little better since there are more individual holdings here and most farmers have raised loans from banks rather than from informal sources. Almost all the farmers interviewed in the village of Gadi Rodan in Kurukshetra said they would benefit from write-offs between Rs 5,000 and Rs 90,000.

But the joy is tempered. In village Gadi Rodan of Kurukshetra, Sri Ram will enjoy a write-off of Rs 77,000 but is sure that he will have to bribe bank officials to get the benefit. "Even for the Kisan Credit Card we have to bribe officials to get our limits," he said.

Meanwhile, farmers in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh say they don't want charity from the finance minister. They are affluent and say they can pay their loans themselves.

Hardant Singh from Jatpura village in Rohtak block, who will benefit from the waiver by Rs 75,000, said his immediate concern is the low prices he gets for the crop.

"Ensuring that we get the right price will solve half the problem," he said. "If the mills paid us on time that would make our lives easy," he and his fellow farmers in the village said.

The waiver has come as a shock to many farmers who took the trouble to pay their loans. Consider the case of Manohar Singh Thakur, a small sugarcane farmer in Dharampuri village of Kawardha district in Chhattisgarh. He cleared his debts two months ago.

"I have been penalised for regularly repaying the loan," says Thakur, who owns a little less than 5 acres of farm-land.

What pains Thakur is that the government has not made any provision to return Rs 5,000 he has paid back to the cooperative bank against his loan in December 2007.

In Kawardha district Business Standard was able to find only two beneficiaries in two villages since most people had paid their loans.

Kawardha District Collector Sonmoni Borah said while most farmers have taken loans from cooperative banks, only 1,500 of the 11,610 sugarcane farmers in the district are defaulters.

On the other hand in Orissa's Barakuala village in Bhubaneshwar, Sarat Mukhi, a 25-year-old marginal farmer with an acre of land, is celebrating the waiver of his unpaid loan of Rs 5,700. The loan was obtained from the Barakuala Bhagabati Seva Samabaya Samiti (BBSSS), the local co- operative society. He says  he will now expand vegetable cultivation.

In Bengal's Bardhaman district, the majority of farmers Business Standard met said the waiver has come as a blessing.

Said Ramprasad Ghoshal of Shaktigarh village who has a loan of Rs 2.50 lakh, "Last year we suffered excessive crop damage and borrowed, but I have already repaid Rs 1 lakh."

Seikh Noor Islam of Paschim Memari village had borrowed Rs 40,000 from a cooperative bank about three years ago to buy a tractor for Rs 1 lakh.

For this, he had mortgaged his land of a little under an acre, later sold his tractor and even sent his son to Delhi to earn. After all that, he has been able to repay only Rs 10,000.

"Now, some people are saying that I don't have to repay my loans. This will be salvation for me. Our state government is of no help. The scheme must be by the Central government," he said.

Even so most farmers in Bardhaman as well as places like Kurukshetra and Kawardha are sceptical of the waiver. The think it won't be implemented in the first place, will attract few beneficiaries and encourage defaults.

(With reports by Vijay C Roy, Bishnu Dash, Komal Amit Gera, Ashutosh Kumar, Namrata Acharya, Pradeep Gooptu, and R Krishna Das)