New Delhi, March 11: India’s two million fishermen, some 40 per cent of whom live in the five states going to the polls next month, have received a post-budget gift.

They are now entitled to subsidised loans at 7 per cent interest, which will later fall to 4 per cent if they pay back the first loan tranches on time.

With the election code of conduct in force, there was little that finance minister Pranab Mukherjee could do to help out his party in the coastal states of Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry and in riverine Assam.

However, the government decided to extend to the fishermen an earlier budget provision to give farmers cheap loans, deciding that this could hardly be construed as a violation of the code.

“The UPA government is sensitive to the needs of fishermen. To meet their needs, I am happy to announce extension of the existing interest subvention scheme for farmers to fish farmers and fishermen,” Mukherjee said.

The innocuous announcement slipped past a bigger one about MPs now being able to spend up to Rs 5 crore a year on local development instead of Rs 2 crore. There’s one proviso: MPs from the five poll-bound states cannot spend the money till the elections are over.

This increase in the MPs’ funds, which are allegedly often misused, will cost the exchequer a tidy Rs 2,370 crore.

The sop to the fishermen is a “good step”, said Thomas Kocherry of the National Fishworkers Forum. “We have been demanding it.”

Kocherry estimated that of the two million fish farmers and fishermen likely to benefit from the scheme, some 40 to 50 per cent were from the five poll-bound states. But data with the animal husbandry department suggested that some 14 million people depended on fishing for their livelihood, and that only a fifth of them lived in these five states.

Analysts, however, explained that fishermen proper were a small subset of those dependent on fishing, a group that included people who sold or salted fish, or wove fishing nets, and the like.

Bengal, which has about one million fisher-folk according to census data, has been struggling to maintain the hike in yields that was propelled by the “Blue Revolution” that ended early last decade.

B.S. Rawat, an agronomist, said: “Cheap credit should be a boon for fish farmers from states like Bengal, who routinely need to buy expensive seedlings and medicines for captive fishing.”

The scheme to give farmers crop loans from recognised banks at 7 per cent interest was started a few years ago to allow them to break free from private moneylenders who were charging up to 36 per cent interest.