Give Farmers Full Aid Amount: Harish Rao To Banks

Telangana Finance Minister T Harish Rao today issued clear instructions to the banks of the state not to withhold any portion of the aid being provided to the farmers under the Rythu Bandhu scheme.

The minister issued these guidelines after reports that some banks were not allowing the farmers to withdraw their rightful Rythu Bandhu aid and were also adjusting the same against old dues surfaced recently. The reports even prompted Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao to issue directions to him to hold an emergency meeting with the bankers in this regard.

Following this, Harish Rao and Chief Secretary Somesh Kumar held a meeting with the bankers at the BRKR Bhavan today.

When asked about the issue, the bankers present at the meeting responded by saying that no instructions to withhold the Rythu Bandhu funds had been issued.

Nevertheless, Rao reiterated his instructions to not withhold any of the Rythu Bandhu funds in the future, and asked the bankers to credit any amount that had been withheld/adjusted back to the concerned farmer's bank account. The bank officials were also told to inform all the bank branches of the directives and to expedite the release/renewal of crop loans.

Besides this, district Collectors were instructed to monitor the aid disbursal through banks at the district level.

While two toll-free helplines - that can be reached from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm at 18002001001 and 04033671300 - have already been set up to address any other issues faced by the beneficiaries, a state-level team will be formed to monitor any other issues faced by the farmers while withdrawing the monetary assistance as well.

Principal Secretary (Finance) Ramakrishna Rao, Special Secretary (Finance) Ronald Rose, Secretary (Agriculture) Raghunandan Rao, State Bank of India DGM Natarajan, Bank of Baroda GM Manmohan Gupta, State Level Bankers' Committee DGM Sesh Kumar Adiraju, Union Bank of India Shaik Hussain, Canara Bank DGM S V J Venu Gopal, Telangana State Cooperative Apex Bank Limited MD N Muralidhar, Indian Overseas Bank AGM R V Sarada, Andhra Pradesh Grameena Vikas Bank GM P Parthasarathi, and Telangana Grameena Bank GM Satish Kumar were among those officials who attended today's meeting.