FARM LOAN WAIVER SCAM - ONE MORE WORM OUT OF THE ROTTING CAN

By Ruma Dubey

The headlines shouted out, “Comptroller and Auditor General has found prima facie evidence of tampering, overwriting and alteration of records in the Agricultural Debt Waiver and Debt Relief Scheme of 2008.”

And apart from the opposition parties in the Parliament, no one seems to be bothered.  There is so much corruption in every facet of our lives, in every Govt scheme that this new “revelation” by the CAG was met with almost a guffaw, and the most common reaction from all was, “so what’s new? Is this news at all?”

The CAG checked records of 90,576 farmers in 715 branches of various banks in 25 States. The sample included 80,299 accounts of farmers who got the benefits and 9,334 accounts of those who were denied the benefits for various reasons.

The CAG has unearthed the following:

• 13.46% of the rejected accounts were actually eligible for benefits under the scheme
• 8.5% of the beneficiaries were not eligible either for debt waiver or for debt relief.
• The Department of Financial Services has been named for “deficient” monitoring of the Rs 52,000-crore scheme
• Micro finance Institutions were given benefit under the scheme in violation of the debt waiver guidelines
• Banks claimed undue benefits like penal interest, legal charges, and miscellaneous charges from the government when these charges were to be borne by the banks themselves.

What happens, apart from the uproar in the Parliament over this CAG report? It will go to the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament for discussions and can we expect any action? Well, the same Committee is currently sitting on 50 such reports.

In a country where corruption was unearthed even for coffins meant for the soldiers, in money collected as ‘relief fund’, what’s so shocking about this new scam? And this is more dangerous than the scam and corruption itself. Our indifference to such scams is what is shocking. There have been huge number of scams which have come out and rocked the country and for some time, everyone participated in debates and nurtured a feeling of wanting to do something to kill this poison ivy. But over a period of time, the frequency with which new and newer scams got unearthed,  with none of them ever closing logically, with no even ever found guilty or prosecuted, no one held culpable, the feeling of helplessness has now turned into a feeling of indifference. And that is the way our mind learns to deal with issues – instead of allowing these politicians and the ‘system’ to increase our frustrations, we have learnt to tune out, simply because nothing ever really comes out of this entire hullabaloo.

So does this mean we stop reacting to every scam which props up?  No, never! We cannot and should ever get so indifferent but once again, there are moods and swings; we might react to some and not bat an eyelid for another. Like the Delhi rape case; the whole country was united and ditto when Anna Hazare was fasting at Ram Leela. So yes, we will come across issues once in a while which we might wake up and react to but expecting people to react to every scam would be naive as all have problems and frustrations in their own lives.

Unless there are issues which do not affect us directly, well, man being a selfish animal, will tend to mostly just “tsk-tsk”, rave and rant about the state of the country and move on. And yes, more importantly, if we start seeing someone actually being held responsible, not a scapegoat but the ‘real’ offenders, then maybe our faith in the system and this entire objective of unearthing scams will get reinstated.