Northern Areas farmers seek loans write-off

Farmers of the Northern Areas have appealed to the Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and PML leadership to write off their agricultural loans as they promised to do so during the Legislative Council elections.
They are looking forward to the visit of the Prime Minister to Gilgit-Baltistan scheduled in June and expecting him to give them a relief package by writing off their loans The area farmers are much frustrated, as they are yet to receive any green signal from the centre regarding writing off the agriculture loans as they were promised by the responsible authorities in the centre.
They have got small agriculture loans ranging from Rs 10, 000 to Rs 1, 00,000 before 2004. But, at the time of the NAs general elections, a number of federal ministers and other senior leaders including former Federal Minister for Kana division, Senator, Nisar Memon, Information Minister, Mohammad Ali Durrani, Cultural Minister Dr G.G Jamal and others visited NAs for the election campaign and announced that the PML government would write off all the agricultural loans up to Rs 50, 000 but the pledge never materialised.
The innocent farmers are yet in the belief that their small loans would be written off hence they are not in the position to pay installments. But, the factual position is that these loans are being multiplied with the passage of time and the agricultural bank has stopped extending small loans to the farmers in the area.
The farmers are optimistic that President General Pervez Musharraf would honour the words of the PML leaders by giving directives to implement the pledge made during his visit to NAs in July last year.
Contrary to this, he did not pay any attention toward the farmers' concerns despite number of reminders by the local party leaders. It is to be noted that previous three prime ministers of PML, including Shaukat Aziz had not bothered to pay a single visit to the Northern Areas during the last five years despite making numerous plans.
"We are still expecting some good news from the Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz's during his upcoming visit to the NAs in the month of June, where he is expected to announce relief package to the people," said an advisor of the Northern Areas Legislative Council.
He, however, on the condition of anonymity, revealed that the Prime Minister is still reluctant to honour the party leaders announcement for writing off of the agri loans on the proposal of NALC advisors during their recent meeting with him.
The advisor regretted that on the one hand, the government favours big industrialists by writing off their loans worth billion of rupees, and on the other, poor and deserving farmers of the NAs were being denied this favour at the one pretext or the other.