Maharashtra officials are still struggling to explain how 813 farmers from Mumbai feature among about 3.6 million whose loans have been waived by the state government.
The chief minister has asked officials to look into it, Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar told BloombergQuint. There is a possibility that some tribal farmers from the city could be on the list or banks gave these loans to meet their farm credit target, he said.
Even Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis was taken by surprise to find farmers from the metropolis on the district-wise list released on Tuesday. It includes names of 694 cultivators from the Mumbai city and 119 from its suburbs. The state has waived farm loans worth Rs 34,000 crore.
CM @Dev_Fadnavis tells district wise number of beneficiary farmers of loan waiver (loan upto ₹1.5lakh) pic.twitter.com/Egt6GUJ21d
“This is not the final list and it will be verified. No ineligible person would be given any waiver,” said Ravindra Marathe, managing director and chief executive officer of Bank of Maharashtra, and chairman of State Level Bankers Committee, which prepared the list.
There could be an error, he said. It's possible a bad loan account from a rural area may have been transferred to an asset recovery branch in Mumbai, he said.
Most of the beneficiary farmers are from Marathwada and Vidarbha, followed by Ahmadnagar and Pune in Western Maharashtra.
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