On Rahul Gandhi’s birthday, Captain Amarinder Singh waives farm loans, rains a slew of sops on Punjab

 Monday, which was also Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s 47th birthday, was Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh’s day of announcements.

Right from the speech that he made inside the Punjab Assembly to his Twitter timeline, Singh was in complete Santa Claus mode yesterday. Following Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, Punjab has announced loan waivers for its farmers. However, the only difference is that Singh claimed that the initiative would give double relief to the affected families as compared to the other two states.

In the Vidhan Sabha, Singh announced the farmer loan waiver scheme which will cover a total of 10.25 lakh farmers, of which some 8.75 lakh farmers have farms of up to five acres.

Singh announced that his government has decided to raise the ex-gratia for suicide-affected families from the existing Rs 3lakh to Rs 5 lakh.

The next loan waiver announcement was made on Twitter. The Punjab CM promised to waive state loans up to Rs 50,000 of Scheduled Castes and economically weaker sections.

By the evening, Singh’s first tweet was on the Satluj-Yamuna link, a 214-km proposed a project to link the rivers. He had said that since Punjab didn’t have any surplus water, he will not allow construction of SYL – one of the key electoral issues of 2017 assembly polls.

Soon, his timeline was filled with announcements — right from free education for girls to a new anti-corruption law. Here are a few announcements made by the Captain:

It would be interesting to see how Singh will manage revenue to meet these promises, as Punjab, as far as its financial health is concerned, is already in the ICU.