Loan waiver to farmers in Maharashtra leaves BJP a divided house
The announcement of loan waiver to marginal farmers might have helped Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis earn some brownie points but the decision has left the ruling party (BJP), a divided house. A legislator from North Maharashtra tells Mail Today that the move will create a rift between BJP and the farmers who will not get the benefit of the loan waiver because of several parameters applied by the government.
At the same time, the government will have to struggle to raise approximately Rs 30,500 crore required to waive off the loan. Finance minister Sudhir Mungantiwar is hopeful of raising the required funds without imposing new taxes. He claims that the state’s share in the reimbursement of central taxes will go up after the Goods and Service Tax (GST) comes into force.
The Centre is going to assist with an amount equal to 14 per cent of its share in taxes to the manufacturing states under the GST regime.
Mungantiwar is hopeful that Maharashtra will earn at least Rs 17,000 crore because of this provision. He has planned to raise the state’s non-tax revenue from the current Rs 15,000 crore to Rs 26,000 crore. However, that seems to be a big challenge. The data available with finance department shows that the government had failed to recover Rs 3,192 crore from non-tax revenue sources in 2016-17.
With this kind of underachievement, the target to raise the non-tax revenue by around Rs 11,000 crore looks like a distant dream.
A section of BJP legislators believes that the decision to waive loans will not help the party in its growth in rural areas as there is already a perception that it is an outcome of the pressure built by the government.
“The CM always signalled that he was not in favour of loan waiver,” a legislator says. “Now, he can’t claim solo credit for the waiver as other parties and farmers organisations too have the moral right of staking their claim in it.”
Fadnavis’ government is already facing a crisis of losing its face after the CM’s big ticket announcement of $5 million (approx Rs 32.24 crore) investment by Foxcon in 2015 remained only on paper.
The global electronic giant company has moved to Bengaluru because the Maharashtra government did not co-operate with it on several points. Only 40 per cent of the Memorandums of Understanding the government signed with various investors in the last two and half years have materialised till date.
With industrialists in two minds over investing in Maharashtra, Fadnavis cannot afford backlash in the farming sector too. If he fails to infuse confidence among the farmers, it will be the beginning of statewide frustration against the BJP.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)