Barring farm loan waiver, Adityanath’s first cabinet meet was all talk, no show
Barring farm loan waiver, Yogi Adityanath’s first Cabinet was all talk, no show
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s first cabinet meeting on Tuesday (April 4) turned out to be damp squib. Other than one path-breaking decision — waiver of farm loans up to Rs 1 lakh — the two-hour long maiden cabinet meeting concluded without any substantial outcome.
The much-awaited cabinet meeting happened after a 16-day wait, therefore, the expectations were naturally high. And the longer the meeting went, expectations, too, soared. At the end, it turned out that all that exercise was much ado about nothing.
There could be no denying that the new chief minister deserves praise for going ahead with the loan waiver, promised by the BJP in its poll manifesto and spelt out every so clearly by even Prime Minister Narendra Modi in one of his poll rallies in UP.
In a major departure from the conventional style of personally briefing the media on the first cabinet meeting, the chief minister passed the buck to his two cabinet colleagues — Shrikant Sharma and Siddharth Nath Singh. And while the waiver was widely welcomed by various kisan unions, everyone felt that the it was only a sign of good things to come, and nowhere close to a solution to the perennial problems of loans which farmers face.
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| The cabinet did not even go deeper into addressing the malaise, which spreads largely on account of the farmers being denied remunerative prices for their produce. (Credit: PTI photo) |
The cabinet did not even go deeper into addressing the malaise, which spreads largely on account of the farmers being denied remunerative prices for their produce. On the other hand, economists see the loan waiver as a political tool to garner votes quite in line with what the Congress did in 2008 for its own survival. The Yogi government’s move to issue Kisan Rahat Bonds (farmer relief bonds) to offset the total burden of Rs 36,000 crore on account of the waiver to about Rs 2.13 crore small and marginal farmers also appears to be hasty and half-baked.
Perhaps it was prompted by Union finance minister Arun Jaitely’s flat refusal to contribute anything towards the loan waiver even though the first formal announcement for the same was made by none other than Modi.
Top officials appear to be as clueless as the new cabinet about how these bonds would be made attractive enough to encourage purchase. As as far as the ban on illegal slaughterhouses or constitution of anti-Romeo squads were concerned, those poll promises have already been put in place.
It was another matter that the manner in which both the issues were being tackled appear quite lackadaisical.
What came as a surprise was the disclosure that only 26 illegal slaughterhouses had been shut by the government and that it was not averse to the idea of renewing their licences through the due process of law. There was no talk about bringing to book officials, whose obvious patronage had allowed the blatant operation of illegal slaughterhouses or those functioning long after expiry of their licences. On the anti-Romeo squads issue, all that the cabinet chose to do was to pat its own back for launching the much-hyped move, supposedly aimed at insuring safety of young girls against harassment.
The chief minister may have taken a serious note of young boys and girls seen sitting or walking together in public spaces, but no action was taken against a single cop guilty of harassing innocent couples. Another major decision, the promise purchase of 80 lakh tonnes of wheat at minimum support price was also made along with glaring consistencies.
It neither makes financial sense nor does it match the existing infrastructure.
Even as the target was just about one-fourth of UP’s total wheat production of about 300 lakh tonnes, the state’s wheat storage capacity was just about 36 lakh tonnes. According to official figures, some 23 lakh tonnes of wheat was already stocked in warehouses, which leaves space for only about 13 lakh tonnes.
Where will the state government store such a huge stock of wheat? Apparently that aspect has not been looked into at all.
To top it all, past records show that in the best of times the UP government could not procure more than 45 lakh tonnes of wheat. The decision, therefore, seems far from pragmatic. Despite all the loud talk against the rampant illegal mining across the state during the Akhilesh Yadav regime, the Yogi cabinet failed to come up with any demonstrative action against the malaise. All that this government ended up doing was setting up a committee of ministers to prepare a report on the issue. The only saving grace was a time-frame of one week that has been fixed for the purpose.
The new cabinet’s decision to constitute a group of ministers to travel across the country and abroad to prepare a new industrial policy for the state was much like new wine in the old bottle.
Such exercises have been undertaken umpteen times by successive government over the past only to end up as free junkets for the political class.
The best of industrial policies prepared over the past have only gathered dust in the labrynths of the UP secretariat.
What seemed most unusual and perhaps even amusing among the cabinet decisions was a “thank you” resolution to prime minister Modi “for granting constitutional status to the National Backward Castes Commission".