MUMBAI: Maharashtra’s farm loan waiver policy has been facing hurdles as the state has not been able to disburse loans to all the farmers promised, and has instead blamed the banks for providing erroneous data, including fake and non-existent Aadhaar numbers of farmers.With the PMO taking up the issue with the state government and banks, state IT secretary Vijay Kumar Gautam has become the first casualty and has proceeded on leave for 15 days due to ‘personal reasons’. Banks have told ET that they have become scapegoats for the lapses of state government. The state government had been claiming that in many cases banks had listed a single non-existent Aadhaar number like 123123123123 as a farmers’ account number, thus insinuating that there could have been a massive fraud between the people and banks. Banks, however, denied such charges saying many farmers did not give their Aadhaar numbers while taking loans, so when the banks left the Aadhaar field blank and sent it to the state government, the file could not be sent through as the software couldn’t read it.This led banks to fill in dummy numbers in the fields where the Aadhaar number should have been given. “Banks were asked to submit data under a standard template with 66 fields. Among the 66 fields, Aadhaar was a compulsory one, which meant that the file would not be accepted without the number. Now, Aadhaar number was not available for all accounts. So we put in dummy numbers since the form would not move without filling in that field. While one bank used the number 123123123123, other banks used similar techniques,” said a bank official on the condition of anonymity.When reminded that the Maharashtra government officials have hinted that this could be a massive fraud, the official said, “There’s no fraud. It’s clear that these were dummy numbers and there’s no hankypanky on our part. We put the numbers because the software was designed in such a manner.” He said that the problem arose because the state government’s IT department designed a software hastily without looking into the practicality aspect of it.Other senior bank officials said that while they are being blamed for the delay in sending out the list of beneficiaries to the government, the state also had a bigger role to play for the delay. “The software was so rigid that even if there was a slight mismatch in the address field -- a hyphen or a comma missing – then the file could not be sent to the government. The worst part was that the software was designed in such a way that it didn’t even point out where was the mismatch in the 66 fields,” said the bank official.“The state wanted to disburse the loans by November and wanted to give it to the actual beneficiaries, but such things take time. Half the information we had on the loans taken was in our core banking system, but the rest had to be collected from different branches and it took time as it had to come from physical records. There was tremendous pressure on us to submit the information early,” he explained.The state IT secretary, whose department was involved in sending the 66 field formats to the banks, however rubbished the banks’ claim about the faulty software. “The co-operation department meticulously worked out a 66-column format wherein each data field was to come from existing loan records of the banks. A series of deliberations took place with the banks and one of the most secured tools ‘json’ was adopted after banks expressed satisfaction with it. Json is globally used in the banking sector,” he wrote to ET.Gautam said that while ‘there could be justification for the slow speed of uploading data on account of time constraints, there’s no reason for uploading erroneous data. Definitely the validation exercise at the banks’ end was not adequate.” “There’s nothing like ‘dummy’ Aadhaar number or passport number, etc. The government never asked for any dummy number, nor did anyone inform that they were going to use dummy numbers, including Aadhaar. The moment banks reported their inability, we made Aadhaar non-mandatory very early,” Gautam explained.When asked about the claim on files being rejected when a slight mismatch was detected in the address field, Gautam said, “A data set containing critical loan account data having impact on transfer of public money has to be dealt with utmost care to ensure zero error. A 25-seater call centre supported by technical and domain team was operationalised to solve the issues. In addition, various changes were made whenever such issues arose. Feedback reports improved accordingly,” claimed Gautam.