Telangana Govt issues detailed guidelines for crop loan waiver a month ahead of Aug 15 deadline  

Telangana Government announces crop loan waiver up to ₹2 lakh for farmers, with detailed guidelines for implementation.

Telangana Government has announced that the crop loan waiver assured up to ₹2 lakh will be applicable to short term loans obtained from scheduled commercial banks, regional rural banks and district cooperative banks.

Loan waiver will be applicable to loans sanctioned/renewed between December 12, 2018 and December 12 last year. Family of each farmer will be eligible for waiver up to ₹2 lakh and this includes the principal and interest due as of December 12 last year. The State Government has issued the detailed guidelines on the applicability of ‘Loan Waiver 2024’to farmers on Monday.

Accordingly, the eligibility of farmers would be based on the database of food security cards issued by the Civil Supplies department. The commissioner and director of Agriculture department would be the nodal officer for implementation of the scheme for which the Hyderabad-based National Informatics Centre would be the IT partner.

An IT portal would be created exclusively by the Agriculture department and the NIC for effective implementation of the scheme. The portal would contain details of loan account data of eligible farmers and the eligibility of farmers would be decided after data validation by the departments concerned. The portal would be linked with the IFMIS system operated by the Finance department for submission of bills and it would also have modules for sharing information with the stakeholders and receiving complaints from farmers.

The banks had been instructed to attach the reference-1 memo of their core banking solution to the prescribed proforma-1 and submit the same to the Government with digital signature of the official concerned. Likewise, the Primary Agriculture Cooperative Societies should should attach reference-2 of the bank branches concerned with proforma-2 and submit the same to the Government. In order to minimise the scope for wrong entries, the Government had mandated validation checks by the Agriculture Commissioner on the NIC database and the information should be submitted to the Government as it is.

Steps should be taken to match the Aadhar data of the pattadar pass books with that of the PDS database to map the eligible farmers’ families. The identified families would be eligible for a cumulative benefit of ₹2 lakh waiver under the scheme. The amounts for eligible families would be transferred into the loan accounts of the eligible farmers in direct benefit transfer mode.

In case of Primary Agriculture Co-operative Society (PACS), the loan waiver amounts would be credited to the respective District Co-Operative Central Bank (DCCB) or the bank branches concerned and the bank branches would in turn credit the loan waiver amount into the accounts of the farmers. According to the guidelines, the loan waiver amounts should be credited into farmers accounts based on the amounts due till Dec 12, 2023 in ascending order and the each family would get benefit of loans up to the same date or ₹2 lakh, whichever is lesser.