GHAZIABAD: Delivering on one of its poll promise of crop loan waiver , more than three thousand small and marginalised farmers from Ghaziabad were provided with 'karja mafi praman patra' or loan waiver certificates by urban development minister Suresh Khanna on Saturday. The Uttar Pradesh government had last week started the process to waive loans to the tune of Rs 36,000 crore of 86 lakh farmers of the state.District agriculture officer M P Singh says, "Out of 24219 farmers in Ghaziabad, we found 3302 farmers eligible for crop loan waiver and on Saturday urban development minister Suresh Khanna handed over loan waiver certificates to these eligible farmers." "Shortly after Yogi Adiyanath government took charge we were asked to undertake an exercise wherein we had to identify small and marginilsed farmers and by means of land mapping and getting the account of farmers linked to Aadhaar we shortlisted eligible farmers in Ghaziabad and an amount to the tune of more than Rs 25 crores 60 lakhs have been disbursed into the accounts of farmers so far," said Singh.The criteria employed in the selection of eligible farmers included that small farmers should be in possession of farm land of more than 2 hectares and for marginalized farmers it is 1 hectares. The waiver is subject to a ceiling of one lakh rupees and it covers crop loans sourced from banks during financial year 2015-16 towards procurement of seeds, fertiliser and pesticides.Reacting to the loan waiver, Rampal Singh, a farmer from Modinagar, said, "Given the stress under which farm sector is in waiver of Rs one lakh is too less and we expected that the ceiling would be raised, but that has not happened. Still, something is better than nothing and now there is no pint cribbing."

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