Yogi Adityanath waives farmers' loan upto ?1 lakh in UP
During the first Cabinet meeting of the new Uttar Pradesh government on Tuesday, CM Yogi Adityanath waived farmers' loan of up to ?1 lakh. The state will spend around ?36,000 crore to fund the loan waiver which will benefit around 86 lakh farmers. Loan waiver for farmers was one of the biggest poll promises of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Delivering on the Bharatiya Janata Party's poll promise, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath today waived off farmers' loan of upto Rs 1 lakh. The decision taken in the first meeting of Adityanath Cabinet will add a burden of Rs 30,729 crore on the state exchequer and benefit nearly 2.15 crore farmers. Briefing mediapersons after a 90-minute meeting of the cabinet, senior minister Siddharth Nath Singh and Srikant Sharma said Rs 30,729 crore was required for waiving loans of small and marginal farmers.Besides, there were about 7 lakh other farmers who had taken loans which turned into non-performing assets (NPAs). In order to bring them back into the mainstream, their outstanding dues of Rs 5,630 crore have also been written off. The BJP, which won a massive majority bagging 312 seats in the 403-seat Uttar Pradesh Assembly, in its Lok Kalyan Sankalp Patra (manifesto), had promised to waive the loans of small and marginal farmers.Prime Minister Narendra Modi too had said during campaigning that writing off farm loans would be among the foremost tasks of the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh.Although there is no Constitutional compulsion of convening the first cabinet meeting within a certain period, traditionally the ruling party has held it within a week or so of forming the government.The Adityanath government was sworn-in on March 19.Government sources said around 2.30 crore farmers in the state suffered losses due to natural calamities in the recent past and were unable to repay loans amounting to about Rs 62,000 crore.They also said that it could be difficult to handle the burden of loan waiver in a single financial year and that was one of the reasons to put the cabinet meeting on hold till a way was found to honour the prime minister's poll promise.With inputs from Balkrishna ALSO READ:  Yogi Adityanath's first interview after taking charge of UP, says Ayodhya issue should be resolved through talksYogi Adityanath gives Uttar Pradesh's bureaucracy the jitters