The death toll of farmers due to suicides is rising like the boom time sensex. According to union minister Bandaru Dattatreya, who hails from the region, in the past one year about 1000 farmers have committed suicide, while fifteen days ago agriculture minister Pocharam Srinivas Reddy put the figure at 409.What exactly is forcing the farmers to commit suicide? According T-Congress working president Bhatti Vikramarkha, it is the way loan waiver implemented that is pushing the farmers into spiral of indebtedness and resort finally to commit suicides.This is how he explained the problem to telugu360.com
According to the Bhatti, who is also a deputy leader in the Assembly, the loan waiver scheme has not done much to provide relief to farmers in acute crisis as most of the amount would not even be sufficient to meet the interest burden.
“During the campaign for 2014 general elections, the TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao gave a call to the farmers not to repay their loans as the coming TRS government would waive them off as a gift from separate Telangana state,” Bhatti says. “Now the government wants to clear the loans in installments. What does it mean? The repayment of loan is postponed after first installment. This postponement puts heavy burden on the farmers as repayment in installment attracts penal interest. When a farm loan up to Rs 1 lakh is cleared fully, it does not attract any interest. If the loan payment is defaulted during the crop season, then the principal amount will attract a rate of interest of 12%. If the farmer is unable to pay the loan during the third crop season, banks levya penal interest of 14%. By this logic, due to the postponement of loan for four years the interest accrued would be a huge sum,” he said.
“Even if one assumes that of the 36 lakh farmers, only half of them availed a Rs 1 lakh loan from the banks, the interest at the rate of 14 per cent works out to be Rs 2,520 crore a year. This means that at the end of five years, when the government pays the last installment it would be Rs 4,250 crore to the bank and the total interest burden alone would be whopping Rs 12,600 crore,” he explained. If the government wants to waive off Rs 17,240 crore of principal amount for 36 lakh farmers, Bhatti asked, who would pay the interest amount of Rs 12,600.
Another reason that is contributing to the debt burden of the farmer is the banks’ approach towards recovery of loans. ” In some cases the banks are releasing the full loan after getting some loan waiver, adjusting the amount against the balance of loan. This attitude forces the farmer to go to private money lenders to get crop loans at exorbitant rate of interest,” he said. And with banks refusing to issues fresh loans where loan accounts are in default, farmers are compelled to turn pledge whatever valuable available with them like `mangalasutras’ of their wives as collateral to get the money from money lenders who charge from 3 per cent to 30 per cent rate of interest. Even after investing this money on the field, the crops failure is hitting the farmers hard. This is the reason for the continued suicides in Telangana, he added.