The state cabinet approved several farmers’ welfare measures, including a Rs 2,000 crore farm loan waiver scheme and a crop insurance scheme with an initial corpus of Rs 100 crore on Wednesday, days ahead of the Hemant Soren government’s first anniversary on December 29.

State cabinet coordination secretary Ajoy Kumar Singh told the media, “Loan waivers up to Rs 50,000 to small and marginal farmers will be given under this scheme. An application fee of Re 1 has been fixed for farmers. The waivers will be sent to farmers through direct benefit transfer.”

He said there are around 12.93 lakh bank accounts with pending loans to the tune of Rs 5,800. Of these, 9.87 lakh accounts are active while the rest have been written off as NPAs. “Around seven lakh farmers are likely to benefit in the first phase,” Singh said.

The cabinet also agreed to roll out Jharkhand Rajya Fasal Rahat Yojana (a farm insurance scheme) for which an initial corpus of Rs 100 crore was approved. Singh said that so far, insurance companies were being roped in to handle the scheme but even after hefty premiums being paid by the government and farmers, the returns were negligible in the event of crop damages.

“For example,” he said “in 2016, a total of Rs 153 crore premium was paid but the insurance companies had paid a meagre Rs 29 crore to farmers post crop damages. In 2017, of the Rs 226 cr premium, only Rs 13 cr was paid back. Hence, the government has decided to run its own insurance scheme for crop losses for which Rs 100 crore has been sanctioned initially,” he said.

The state government will also roll out CM Pashudhan Yojana to promote animal husbandry to increase farmers’ incomes. For the current fiscal, the cabinet sanctioned Rs 154 crore out of a total outlay of Rs 355 crore.

In all, over two dozen proposals were taken up at Wednesday’s meeting. To encourage tribal students to pursue higher studies, the cabinet also gave its nod to a new annual plan to fund the overseas education of 10 SC/ST students. “A few courses and universities across the globe have been identified where students can opt to pursue master’s degrees or Phd/Mphil. The scheme will cover tuition fees, cost of visa, a portion of maintenance costs,” Singh said.

The cabinet also okayed the setting up of two additional special CBI courts for hearing chit fund related cases. District courts will also come up in Hazaribagh, Dumka, Daltonganj and Chaibasa, in addition to Dhanbad and Ranchi for hearing cases against MPs and MLAs.

To curb overpricing of medicines, the cabinet approved the setting up of Jharkhand State Pharmaceutical Price Monitoring Unit. “It’s job will be to keep a tab on instances of overcharging of medicines against its approved prices,” said Singh.