RPG Group Chairman Harsh Goenka landed himself in a soup after his tone-deaf “joke” mocking farm loan waivers was called out by many Twitter users.
The Congress, after forming governments in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, had announced farm loan waivers as promised in its manifesto for the assembly election.
Goenka tweeted, “I need your urgent help and suggestions. I have two loans — one car loan and one home loan.”
“Any idea how I can convert them to FARM loans?”
Goenka’s net worth, according to Forbes, is a whopping $2 billion. Earlier this year, he bought a five-bedroom luxury apartment in Mumbai’s Malabar Hill for Rs 45.2 crore, according to The Economic Times.
His tweet did not go down well with a lot of Twitter users.
Journalist Rohini Mohan pointed him towards the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) figures of 2017. The PAC chief had said in 2017 that out of the Rs 6.8 lakh crore of Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) of public sector banks, a whopping 70% are those of big corporate houses and hardly one percent of it constitutes loans to farmers.
Others reminded Goenka of the many millionaires and billionaires who have fled the country after defaulting on their loans.
Senior journalist Shekhar Gupta also called him out and termed it “unfair and insensitive”.
Goenka, who is a regular on Twitter, said at the ‘ET 40 Under Forty’ awards in September this year that he regrets “several” tweets he has made.
Below are some of his other tweets:
In November, he tweeted a “joke” about there being two kinds of wives and when it was pointed out that this was “not in good taste”, Goenka said that a “joke is a joke”.
