On 25 July 2022, the Aam Aadmi Party shared an infographic from its official Twitter handle in Gujarat, tweeting “Mercy on industrialists and atrocities on the general public.”
According to this infographic, the BJP government has waived off the loans of 13 big corporate houses of the country worth Rs 2,85,080 crore, i.e. more than Rs 2 crore 85 lakh.
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Aam Aadmi Party has made this claim without any evidence and documents.
Fact check
As the Aam Aadmi Party made this claim without any documents or evidence, it was not easy for us to get proper information.
After some investigation, it came to our attention that this is not the first time such claims have been made by an opposition party or its leaders.
The Congress party has also made similar types of claims about loan waiving in the past.
According to an India TV report, the Congress party had alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party had extorted Rs 68,608 from 50 bank loan defaulters including Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi, and Vijay Mallya. A loan of crores of rupees has been waived off.
Apart from this, on February 23, 2020, Priyanka Gandhi alleged that the BJP government has waived off loans worth 8 lakh crore rupees. She wrote, “Government waives off nearly Rs 8 lakh crore of loans to PM Modi’s ‘capitalist friends’.”
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Even after a lot of research, we did not find the figures that the Aam Aadmi Party claimed in the claim, but we did find similar figures which said that the RBI had written off the accounts of borrowers over the last few years.
Referring to these accounts maintained by the RBI, opposition parties claim that the bank has given loan Waive-off to the borrowers.
Let us first understand the difference between a loan waiver and Write-off.
Waive-off : The borrower does not have to repay the outstanding loan amount. A person is no longer liable to repay the outstanding loan amount. This includes the complete cancellation of loan recovery by the lender. The bank will not take legal action against the borrower. The loan has expired.
Write-off: The lender will write off the loan to maintain a clean balance sheet. However, this does not signal the end of debt recovery. Banks/lenders do not close loans. They will seek legal help to recover the dues.
In our research, we have found that the RBI said that the technical/prudential write-off as on September 30, 2019, is Rs 68,607 crore and includes the amount, while former Congress supporter Saket Gokhale, now a member of the TMC party, An RTI query was filed. Information 50 of the top willful defaulters and their current loan status.
Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani are not on the board of directors of the listed companies. So the photo of Ambani and Adani in the infographic is also wrong.
The claim made by Priyanka Gandhi was another attempt by the opposition party to spread misinformation. According to an article in The Hindu shared on February 22, 2020, the government has waived bad loans worth Rs 8 lakh crore.
Many such allegations have been leveled by the opposition parties to tarnish the image of the Modi government. They lack any evidence or official documents to support their claims. His claims have been dismissed many times in the past. This suggests that these claims are mere allegations. Hence the claim made by Arvind Kejriwal means nothing but firing in the air.
The goal of the Only Fact India team is to provide with authentic and transparent news facts and debunk misinformation that is spread out with the intention of demeaning anyone’s image.
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