Blanket Schemes - bon pour rien!

Loan waiver in Indian budget has received mixed reactions. The economist calls it a bold step and efficient tool to poverty alleviation schemes, newspaper editorials, blogs (for example IFMR, ToI) have replied to it by saying popular budget doesn’t win election (sometimes analyzing the economics into it), Government is happy and poor Banks are thinking why us? I say steps like waiving off loan are OK, if they are well targetted! I draw my conclusion using common sense, no big reading.
Schemes like this are announced if Farmers in the country are in very bad shape, they don't have money to spend on daily living, so government gives them this respite. Is this true for India? Yes, there are few regions where this is true but not the whole country. This is one of the drawbacks of all the thinking that has gone into this announcement. The biggest, in my view is differentiation between big and small farmer.
In many instances a farmer with less land is supposed to be vulnerable. But there are places where big farmers face problems too. In Vidarbha a farmer with even 25 acres land holding is generating lesser income than a farmer having 5 acres in madhya pradesh. There are reasons for it, which range from weather to bad government policies and support.
The waiver, while comes as boon for farmers all over the country, big farmer, like the ones in Vidarbha has no respite. And boons of these kind are not good, they lead to increase in no of defaults. More so, think of a farmer who actually repaid the loan amount, by cutting down expenses. He'd have got a heart attack.
If this scheme was to prevent debt trap and ultimately the suicides, it should have been announced for all farmers and in places like Vidarbha. The cost would have been less, and farmers in general would not be thinking of free- riding on future loans. A blanket is necessary when mosquitoes are all around, but if they are biting only hands, why cover the whole body and suffocate!

As far as political budgets are concerned I would say what a panwala told me in a village, “Governments are shrewd, they announced loan waiver and hiked Petrol prices”.