Bangladesh Bank on Thursday asked scheduled banks to disburse fresh farm loans to farmers even if they fail to repay installments of the previous agricultural loans in the country’s 21 flood affected districts. The central bank issued a circular to managing directors and chief executive officers of all banks asking them to maintain an intensive monitoring to disburse the farm loans in the flood-affected districts so that the farmers in those areas would not face any harassment to receive the loans.
BB also asked the banks to speed up their loan disbursement programme for cultivating alternative crops in the flood-affected areas.
The flood-affected farmers of 21 districts including Kurigram, Nilphamari, Lalmonirhat, Gaibandha, Rangpur, Bogra, Sirajganj, Tangail, Jamalpur, Dhaka, Manikganj, Munshiganj, Faridpur, Rajbari and Sylhet will get the benefit of the central bank’s relaxed farm loan policy.
The BB in its circular said that most of the cultivated crops in the 21 districts were washed away in the floods.
For this reason, the banks should disburse more farm loans to continue the agriculture activities in the districts, it said.
A BB official told New Age on Thursday that some deputy commissioners of flood affected districts had recently requested the central bank to relax the farm loan policy for their respective areas.
Meanwhile, some central bank officials feared that the defaulted farm loans would increase more in the coming days as the farmers would have
to count huge lose due to the flood.
A large number of farmers will become defaulters in the 21 districts if they do not get fresh farm loans from the banks without repaying their previous loans, the official said.
According to the latest BB data, the defaulted loans increased by Tk 1,442.62 crore to Tk 7,751.57 crore as of July 31, 2014 from Tk 6,308.95 crore as of June 30, 2014.
-With New Age input
