Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Telangana: Demand for forgiving agricultural loans… again!!!

Politics often defy common logic. After all politicians care more about buying hearts (or votes) than earning it. On last Monday, close to 30 legislators were suspended from Telangana assembly for their continuing protests to get a firm commitment from Telangana government for one time loan settlement for farmers. By the way, they announced a state wide bandh on Oct 10.

I know farmers are facing a lot of challenges and many of them are committing suicides because of economic hardships. But is writing off the farm loan every time is the right way to solve things? Most often, along with farm loans many other loans also get disappeared from the books. For capital crisis in agriculture we need to find a solution, not to apply some quick fixes.

I am sure that, if government and our agricultural research centres are not helping Indian farmers to compete with high productivity of Chinese, European and American farmers; if there is not enough cold storage to store their  perishable farm products; if we are not building good distribution networks; if the farmers are not able to bring modern farming methodologies to their field; if they are completely depends on monsoon; if poor farmers have no access to banking channels and depends on loan sharks for capital, our problems are not going to disappear.

Writing off loans is not a solution; it’s a new problem on its own.

Sajeev

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