Freedom From Debt: Punjab Waives Rs 68 Crore For 4,727 Dalit Families

This waiver doesn’t just end financial bondage, it ends years of tucenda— unspoken trauma

- TARUNI GANDHI CHANDIGARH

For decades, their pain was tucenda-too deep, too bruised, and too tangled with humiliation to be put into words. Across Punjab, thousands of Scheduled Caste (SC) families bore the weight of unpaid loans with little more than hope, resilience, and repeated rejections from a system that once promised to uplift them.

ON TUESDAY, SILENCE WAS FINALLY SHATTERED The Punjab Cabinet, led by Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, approved a Rs 67.84 crore loan waiver for 4,727 SC and Divyangjan families who had taken loans from the Punjab Scheduled Castes Land Development and Finance Corporation (PSCFC) before March 31, 2020. With this, a long-overdue reckoning has begun-for debts that were often never about money, but about broken dreams.

"This isn't merely a financial decision," said Mann after the Cabinet meeting. "This is a moral obligation. These families waited too long, and the previous governments never listened. Today, we correct that."

"MY HUSBAND DIED WITH LOAN PAPERS IN HIS PILLOWCASE" In Faridkot, 63-year-old Darshan Kaur's eyes filled with tears as she clutched her late husband's PSCFC loan file.