India, March 16 -- On March 6, the Mahayuti government announced the state's third farm loan waiver since 2017 in order to ameliorate agrarian distress. However, farm experts and government officials feel that at least 10% or 500,000 farmers will remain out of the beneficiary list if the government insists on extending the scheme only to farmers registered on the AgriStack platform. Of the state's 17.1 million farmers, only 13.1 million have registered themselves in AgriStack after its launch in January 2025.

Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis announced the farm loan waiver in his budget speech, and said that around 4.8 million farmers were expected to get the benefits. Of these, 2.8 million will get an actual waiver of up to Rs.2 lakh, wh...