MUMBAI, March 16 -- On March 6, the Mahayuti government announced the state's third farm loan waiver since 2017 in order to ameliorate agrarian distress. However, farm experts and government officials feel that at least 10% or 500,000 farmers will remain out of the beneficiary list if the government insists on extending the scheme only to farmers registered on the AgriStack platform. Of the state's 17.1 million farmers, only 13.1 million have registered themselves in AgriStack after its launch in January 2025. Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis announced the farm loan waiver in his budget speech, and said that around 4.8 million farmers were expected to get the benefits. Of these, 2.8 million will get an actual waiver of up to Rs 2 lakh, while 2 million more will get an incentive of Rs 50,000 towards regular repayments of their loans. The overall burden is estimated to be Rs 35,000 crore. However, the CM said that the government would insist on farmers who applied for waivers/ incentives first registering themselves on AgriStack, a digital public infrastructure platform, known as 'Farmer ID' in common parlance. AgriStack was launched by the central government to obtain clean data on farmers: their land holdings, crops, the government benefits taken by them and so on. Since its inception, 13.1 million farmers have obtained their Farmer ID. The shortfall in registration is attributed to many factors, among them a lack of resources/ awareness among marginal farmers, the legal difficulties surrounding land titles, and the fact that wealthier farmers who do not get any benefit and may be reluctant to disclose all their details on a public platform. The earlier two waivers-by the Fadnavis government in 2017 and the Uddhav Thackeray government in 2019-saw the disbursement Rs 16,408 crore to 4.21 million farmers and 25,754 crore to 4.7 million farmers respectively. "Although the government expects 4.8 million farmers to benefit from the waiver this time, the mandatory registration in AgriStack may deprive at least half a million farmers," said an agriculture department official. The official said that AgriStack aimed to weed out ineligible beneficiaries who held a lot of land or had another primary source of income. "Marginal farmers, with holdings of less than five gunthas are not coming forward, as they get scarcely any benefits. Some farm land is held by institutions or trusts, and these cannot be issued Farmer IDs. But eligible poor farmers who have not been able to register themselves will be left out," he said, adding that the government was undertaking a fresh drive to register the remaining farmers in AgriStack. Farm activist Vijay Jawandhia reiterated that a large number of farmers had not been able to register themselves in AgriStack for various reasons. "Hundreds of thousands of farmers could be deprived of the loan waiver," he said. "If the government is honest in its intention in giving loan waivers, it should not insist on registration in AgriStack. All the farmers should be given the benefits until the registration process is completed."...