Janet Mason 
BENGALURU: The Karnataka Legislative Assembly on Wednesday passed the debt remedy bill geared toward easing the monetary burden on landless laborers, people from weaker sections, and small farmers who had been unnoticed by the ₹45000 crore farm mortgage waiver announced by the H.D. Kumaraswamy-led coalition government last year. The Karnataka Debt Relief Bill, 2018, comes almost six months after the country took the ordinance direction to get the proposal accepted by the president. “We had taken the ordinance direction because the residence was not included in the consultation then. We have ratified this bill this time around,” Bandeppa Khasempur, minister for Co-operation, stated.
The bill is a part of the Janata Dal (Secular) birthday celebration’s pre-election promise to relieve the piling up debt burden of the state’s farmers, who have not recovered from consecutive droughts, and lawmakers cannot offer a long-term, sustainable answer for the deepening agrarian distress. The Congress, one 1/2 of the coalition in Karnataka, has been seeking to champion the cause of farmer agitations in recent months, which has emerged as one of the largest ballot platforms for the Lok Sabha elections, scheduled to be held later this year. The celebration had stormed to strength in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh with the promise of a farm mortgage waiver, decreasing the number of states presently under BJP rule.
The Congress-JD(S) is hoping to coins in on its farm mortgage waiver and debt comfort invoice to currencies in on votes of the agricultural network in the coming parliamentary polls. The debt remedy bill underlines that ‘no civil court shall entertain any fit or other complaints towards the debtor or his surety for the recovery of any quantity of such debt.’ “Every debtor or his surety undergoing detention in civil jail in the execution of any decree passed against them through a Civil Court in one of these debts shall be released,” provides another clause of the bill. The invoice also says that no legal practitioner shall be allowed to appear in any proceeding under this Act earlier than the debt remedy officer.
