No Country for Poor Men as India’s Big Farmers Get Cash – Bloomberg.
Vattikuti Prasad grows rice, bananas and sugar cane on his farm as big as 27 football fields in a part of southeastern India where most farmers own plots the size of just one. He has two homes, including a four-bedroom house he rents out in a nearby town.
This year Prasad took out at least 120,000 rupees ($1,940) in cheap farm loans from State Bank of Indiaand said he planned to use them to open a third branch of his pesticide and seed business in the state of Andhra Pradesh. And for the second time since 2008, he won’t be paying the money back: The government has offered to forgive 350 billion rupees in agricultural loans, according to a report seen byBloomberg News.
“It is easily available, so I’m taking it,” Prasad, 37, said while counting a wad of 1,000-rupee notes from his shop’s cash drawer under a noisy ceiling fan in the punishing heat. As many as 80 percent of fellow businessmen in his town of Tanuku, a 400-kilometer (250-mile) drive from Hyderabad toward the Bay of Bengal, have spent their farm loans on all kinds of things, especially buying more land, he said, with the confidence the money is free. “Why should we repay now?”
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