Deshmukh urges Centre to amend terms of loan waiver

The FM in his Budget speech had said “for marginal farmers (i.e holding up to 1 hectare) and small farmers (1-2 hectare), there will be complete waiver of all loans”.

In Deshmukh’s assessment, the impact of indebtedness on a farmer with a larger land holding in a dry area would be more as compared to a farmer with even a smaller land holding in an irrigated area.

In that regard, while one of the suggestions is to link the waiver to an overall monetary ceiling, another alternative is to raise the land holding size beyond two hectares for farmers owning land in dry areas.

It is learnt that the Centre sees an element of inequity in the conditionalities in their present form and the matter would be taken up by the Centre before the package is finalised. Apart from Maharashtra, other states have also put forward similar demands, say officials.

At the meet where the annual plan size for the state for the year 2008-09 was fixed at Rs 25,000 crore which includes an additional Central assistance of Rs 250 crore for projects of special interest, the state Government also asked the Centre to help to create a special storage facility to store up to two lakh tonnes of onions.

Added to this, Maharashtra also wants the Centre’s help to allow the state Government to develop forests on public private partnership (PPP). While it wants the Centre to implement the expert committee’s recommendations on making Mumbai an international financial hub, the Planning Commission, on its part, has asked the state Government to revisit the Rent Control Act.

Despite showing good trends in growth rate, the state is expected to face huge power shortage to the tune of 25 per cent in the coming four to five years. In addition to the plans to add around 5,000 MW of fresh power capacities in the next five years, the Centre told the state Government to pursue some ultra mega power projects.

Ahluwalia said the Commission was keen on improving the performance of the Centrally-sponsored programmes and, in that regard, invited suggestions from the state.