BHOPAL: The issue of farm loan waiver kicked up dust during Question Hour in the House on Tuesday. As a result of the row, Speaker Girish Gautam had to adjourn the House for five minutes.
During Question Hour, Congress legislator Kunal Choudhary wanted to know from agriculture minister Kamal Patel whether the decision of one government could be scrapped by another. Choudhary was speaking about farm loan waiver. Choudhary also wanted to know whether the farm loan waiver policy would be followed or stopped.
In reply to Choudhary’s question, Patel said Kamal Nath and Rahul Gandhi had deceived the farmers. Immediately after Patel’s statement, there was a din in the House. Legislator Jitu Patwari said the Congress government had waived the loans of 2,700,000 farmers. Patwari wanted to know whether the government would waive the loans of the rest of the farmers or recover the money from those peasants whose loans had been waived.
Patel, however, could not give any reply to it and parliamentary affairs minister Narottam Mishra had to intervene to handle the situation. Mishra said the loans of farmers who had borrowed Rs 2 lakh had not been waived and the present government was carrying the burden of the sin committed by the previous regime. Minister for department of cooperatives Arvind Bhadoria said the Congress government had not given any funds to the cooperative societies for waiving loans. According to Bhadoria, money was given to the societies only when the BJP returned to power. At this stage, the Congress members walked out of the House, saying that the government was dithering on giving a reply to the question over farm loan waiver.
Walk-out over cut in scholarship grants
The Congress raised a storm over the reduction of the scholarship budget meant for SC/ST students. Both the central and state governments have cut the grants. Legislator Phundelal Marko raised the issue in the House. He said the Centre and the state had both trimmed the amount of scholarship. The Congress called the government anti-SC/ST and left the House. After that, Marko sat in a dharna at Gandhi’s statue.