Maharashtra loan waiver scheme: CM Fadnavis meets bankers over discrepancies in beneficiary lists
A report by ‘The Indian Express’ had showed that lists provided by banks had names of lakhs of farmers with the same Aadhaar and savings account numbers.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Wednesday met bankers to address hurdles before the government’s attempts at getting farmers to register online for its loan waiver scheme.
The meetings were arranged after a report in The Indian Express on Tuesday said that lists provided by banks showed that lakhs of farmers had the same Aadhaar and savings account numbers.
CM @Dev_Fadnavis calls and chairs a meeting of State Level Bankers’ Committee (SLBC) and various Govt departments to remove the hurdles in processing of the list of eligible farmers as some discrepancies were found in the data provided by banks. pic.twitter.com/USOwFHwQ0S
— CMO Maharashtra (@CMOMaharashtra) October 25, 2017
The Chief Minister’s Office announced that it had decided to form joint teams of representatives from the concerned banks and the government’s Information Technology Department. The teams, it said, will “remove all the hurdles on war footing” and the process will begin anew from Thursday.
The government tried to reason that Aadhaar-based linking would help it avoid duplication and prevent fake accounts from enjoying the benefits, PTI reported. However, as The Indian Express found out, in a list submitted by a leading national bank, 253 farmers had the identical Aadhaar number of 100000000000. The daily cited more such examples in its report.
The Maharashtra administration began to disburse the loan waiver amounts to farmers’ accounts last week, four months after it announced the scheme. The move is expected to benefit nearly 89 lakh farmers.