Agricultural Credit in India – Innovations in Design and Delivery of Products and Services
The concept of bringing farmers together in a voluntary group was initiated in 1982 through the Farmers’ Club Programme. This institutional innovation has received a renewed focus from 2007–08 onwards. Nevertheless, access to farm credit sector has not been easy and adequate. In this paper, innovative approaches to improve agricultural credit flow have been captured from the secondary sources and analysed using compound annual growth rate and descriptive analytical tools. The share of private moneylenders has decreased with the institutional agencies making inroads into the rural scene. The structure of the sources of credit has witnessed a clear shift wherein the scheduled commercial banks and RRBs have emerged as the major sources of direct and indirect institutional credit to agriculture in recent years. The SHG-bank linkage programme, Kisan Credit Card, Farmers Clubs, Joint Liability Groups and Interest Subvention Scheme have been promoted to supplement rural credit delivery effectively and have also shown a significantly increasing growth rates over the years. In addition, there are a number of other small innovations that have taken place across the spectrum of agricultural credit markets. All these would eventually contribute to making sustainable access to agricultural finance leading towards a path for prosperity of farming community, especially the small and vulnerable farm households.
Enabling Business of Agriculture via New Financing Technologies
Agriculture business in the coming years will pave a way to fulfill the food requirement of all as by 2050 world’s population will reach to around 9 billion. To feed such a large population our farmers must get the real benefits like of Financial, Technological, Machinery, on time credit, Vibrant supply chain, Schemes as per the changing trend of market. Currently around 800 million people go to bed hungry every day to overcome such drastic and inhumane conditions in near future which is supposed to be crueler to mankind, our farmers must produce a lot, increasing per hectare yield will be the main challenge and which can only be achieved by using latest technological tools, high quality fortified seeds. For this all our farmers institutions, Fintech sectors, govt. institutions, Machinery sector needs to come together to address this situation. To enable the agribusiness govt should develop user friendly regulations and schemes and at the same time they should be monitored continuously, this agribusiness supporting practices needs to incorporate farmers, firms, food industry, producers, vendors to facilitate selling and purchasing of goods and services. 
Estimate suggest that demand for food will increase by around 68% by 2050. Today, growth of agricultural finance is constrained by major factors such as: i) Ineffective and not so accessible policies ii) Lack of backward integration towards farm gate and include a high cost iii) Low level of productivity due to fragmentation and iv) Lack of financial expertise and institutions which can provide a lot of agricultural loan portfolios. Time has come to give our agriculture community the respect and price they deserve to raise their living standard to bring them out of poverty. Government must develop financial cooperatives / Institutions which can strategically provide access to financial support like access to timely credit, insurance with the use of latest technological tools and keep a proper tab afterwards to properly recover those debts. To show case some of the best financial investment made by government we considered e-NAM and Kisan Call Center (KCC) in our thesis study and we will be looking upon the impact they are having on daily lives of a farmer all over India.
Did the metamorphosis from Export Processing Zones to Special Economic Zones improve the efficiency of trade enclaves in India?
In this paper, the efficiency of seven conventional Special Economic Zones in India is analyzed, by adopting a stochastic production frontier technique, for the period between 1986–1987 and 2007–2008.Results indicate that although the efficiency scores of these enclaves have improved over the years, specifically with the introduction of the SEZ policy (2000–2001), it is far below the threshold level as identified in the literature. Besides, one can also observe a discrepancy emerging between better export earning zones and efficient zones. On the determinants side, policy intervention and large geographical area, accompanied by clustering of units, are found to have impacted the efficiency scores of these enclaves positively.