Maha woes delay farm loan waiver

THE STATE IT DEPARTMENT FOUND MULTIPLE ERRORS IN THE DATA PROVIDED BY THE BANKS ON FARM LOAN ACCOUNTS

MUMBAI: As the state government struggles with errors in its database of farmers’ bank details, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis directed banks to start transferring the loan waiver amount to the accounts concerned from Thursday.

Fadnavis issued the directives in a state-level bankers’ committee (SLBC) meeting he had called urgently after discrepancies were found in lakhs of farmer account details provided by the banks, which led to a delay in clearing their loan waiver applications. The state information technology (IT) department found multiple errors in the data provided by the banks on farm loan accounts. One of the most major errors found was of several farmers being linked to a single Aadhaar number.

Of the 26 lakh bank account details provided by the banks, the state government could verify only two lakh.

The state will start disbursing loan amounts to these accounts from Thursday onwards, said Subhash Deshmukh, state coop- eration minister.

In the SLBC meeting, Fadnavis asked banks officials to coordinate with the state IT department to rectify the errors. “Each bank should appoint an IT expert to coordinate with the state IT department to resolve such issues,” he said.

“At present, our priority is to clear loan applications of the farmers and not run after banks that are providing erroneous details. Instead of going into such issues, banks have been asked to cooperate with the government to resolve the matter at the earliest,” said a senior official.

The state recently set aside ₹4,000 crore to reimburse banks against the loan waiver amount. It received 56.59 lakh applications covering 77.27 lakh farmers for the ₹34,022-crorewaiver package announced by the CM.