Maharashtra Congress for widening waiver scheme

The state Congress, perhaps realising that the loan waiver scheme announced by Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram leaves its large supporter base, especially from Vidarbha, high and dry, is now pushing for enlarging the scope of the scheme.

A party leader said the cap of 2 hectares is going to help the NCP only, which has base in western Maharashtra, where land holdings are fragmented and due to availability of irrigation facilities a farmer is entitled for a bigger loan.

While the dryland farmer in Vidarbha gets an average crop loan of Rs 5,000 to Rs 7,000 for cotton or soybean, a sugarcane farmer from western Maharashtra gets loan of Rs 40,000 per acre or grape orchard owner Rs 1 lakh per acre.

According to the government's own estimate, 38 per cent of the farmers from the suicide prone six districts of Vidarbha, for which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had announced a special package, will not benefit much from the loan waiver as their landholdings are more than 2 hectares.

And interestingly, almost half of the 75 MLAs of the Congress come from Vidarbha. All this is making Congress leadership jittery.

On Wednesday, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh met Congress president Sonia Gandhi and asked her to increase the landholding size to 15 acres in case of dryland farmers and also give loan waiver of Rs 50,000 to all the farmers irrespective of the land they owned.

A similar demand was made by state Congress chief Prabha Rau, who met Gandhi separately.