Bengaluru, Mar 9 (IANS): The Karnataka government is yet to take a call on the demand of waiving loans for the families of farmers who died due to Covid-19 in the first and second waves.

The opposition and farming organisations are demanding loan waiver for the families.

According to the department of cooperation, as many as 10,437 farmers in the state have succumbed to Covid. The deceased farmers in Karnataka have taken loans of Rs 92 crore. The Union and state governments are providing compensation on humanitarian grounds. The state government is providing Rs 1 lakh and Centre is giving Rs 50,000 to the families of the Covid victims, according to Department of Cooperation.

The state government maintains that it had extended the tenure of loans of the deceased farmers in district cooperative central banks. The government is paying interest subsidies in all such cases, said Minister for CoOperation S T Somashekar.

BJP MLC P.M. Muniraju Gowda raised the issue in the legislative council on Tuesday and demanded that the government waive off the loans of farmers who succumbed to Covid-19. The families of the Covid victims are in pathetic condition and in urgent need of loan reprieve, said Gowda.

All these families lost their earning members, and the surviving family fear being blacklisted by the cooperative banks, Muniraju Gowda said.

The farming organisations have appealed to the government that the families of the deceased farmers will get trapped by private money lenders and finance companies, who charge exorbitant interest rates and many of them would end up their lands, their only source of survival.