BENGALURU: With possible glitches that might have affected the crop loan waiver scheme being addressed, the State government will extend the process of verifying credentials of other beneficiary farmers across the State. The process, according to Munish Moudgil, Commissioner, Survey, Settlements and Land Records, is expected to begin in the first half of December.
Speaking to The New Indian Express, he said that instructions have been issued to 6,500 branches of commercial banks to verify data regarding crop loans from November 23.“If they can complete data collection in a week, then we can ask the farmers to visit the branches and submit the essential documents - Aadhaar, ration card and survey numbers,” he said.
Delay in data accessibility
During the pilot scheme, there were problems regarding verification of Aadhaar and ration cards. “The issue was the delay in verifying a person’s Aadhaar and ration card credentials, as our query was routed through National Informatics Centre (NIC) for Aadhaar. In the case of ration cards, delays were experienced when the database was simultaneously used for verifying beneficiaries and availing ration from the government. As a result, we have shifted a copy of ration card database to our servers,” he said.
Meanwhile, permission of Central government has been sought by the State to access the Unique Identification Authority of India database without having to go via NIC. “The State will be allowed to use the database to directly verify the farmers’ credentials in a couple of days,” he said. This would reduce the delay currently experienced by farmers at banks with respect to verifying documents, he added.
Additional men at banks
Additional personnel are being deployed to banks where the number of crop loans exceeds 800. “We have also introduced a token system by which we are reducing the number of farmers who throng the banks. People with different token numbers are asked to come on specific dates so as to avoid long queues of farmers,” he said.Sources also told TNIE that data entry operators at the banks’ end have been verifying around 30-40 beneficiaries. “The process has started only six days ago and we have received encouraging response from farmers. All other minor glitches in the system will be sorted out soon.”