Farmers continue stir demanding full crop loan waiver and penal interest

Members of various farmers’ organisations continued their sit-in agitation demanding full crop loan waiver for the third day near Samayapuram in Tiruchi on Thursday.

The farmers, who began the agitation on September 15, have been demanding that the State government waive the crop loans of farmers fully without conditions.

Although Minister for Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment S. Ramesh, Minister for Cooperatives V. Gandhiraj, Minister for Agriculture R. Vinod, and Deputy Speaker M. Ravishankar on Tuesday held talks with the leaders of the organisations in Tiruchi, they could not persuade them to withdraw the agitation.

The agitating farmers claimed that members of over 40 farmers organisations from the State were participating in the agitation. The crop loan waiver implemented by the government was contrary to the election promise made by Chief Minister and TVK leader C. Joseph Vijay. No waiver scheme announced by any State government in the country had so many conditions as the one announced by the Tamil Nadu government, they said.

“Over the past 15 years, farmers were facing losses continuously and have been struggling to repay their loans. With production cost being one of the highest in the state in the country, the minimum support price offered by the government was not remunerative for farmers. Contrary to the Ministers’ assurances earlier that a meeting will be arranged with the Chief Minister, the government has neither invited farmers for the talks or conceded their demand for full waiver,” they said.

Farmers maintained that they would continue their agitation until their demands were conceded. Apart from full crop loan waiver, they have called for halting recovery proceedings by cooperative societies; waiver of all loan dues up to March 31 instead of confining the waiver to loans taken between May 1, 2025 and February 28, 2026; and writing off the interest and penal interest on farmers who had defaulted on their crop loans.

The organisations condemned restricting the waiver to only one member of a family and denying the waiver to families of directors of cooperative societies and sought the withdrawal of such conditions.