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.
Technology Transfer to the Farmers and Role of KVKs
India is a large agricultural country with around 50% of its population depending on agriculture and allied sector while it contributes only 17% of the GDP. Technological change has been the major driving force for increasing agricultural productivity and promoting agriculture development. Technology transfer should aim at enhancing the socio-economic standards of rural farmers by upgrading their knowledge and skills. Agricultural innovations and diffusion of new technologies are important factors for all developing countries like India in their quest for food and nutritional security and improving the quality of life of people engaged in agriculture and related activities. This necessitates that farmers must have access to sustainable technology which is suitable to their micro-farming situations under various production systems operated under different agro-ecologies in the country. Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) is one such institution which is helping farmers in this area. In view of the crucial role played by KVKs in technology transfer, the paper aims to assess the role of KVKs in technology sharing to the farmers. As new researches/innovations on agriculture and allied sectors is a continuous process in the country, the paper analyses whether and how these changes are known to farmers and are these changes becoming accessible to farmers and helping them?
On the validity of area-based income measures to proxy household income
BackgroundThis paper assesses the agreement between household-level income data and an area-based income measure, and whether or not discrepancies create meaningful differences when applied in regression equations estimating total household prescription drug expenditures.MethodsUsing administrative data files for the population of BC, Canada, we calculate income deciles from both area-based census data and Canada Revenue Agency validated household-level data. These deciles are then compared for misclassification. Spearman's correlation, kappa coefficients and weighted kappa coefficients are all calculated. We then assess the validity of using the area-based income measure as a proxy for household income in regression equations explaining socio-economic inequalities in total prescription drug expenditures.ResultsThe variability between household-level income and area-based income is large. Only 37% of households are classified by area-based measures to be within one decile of the classification based on household-level incomes. Statistical evidence of the disagreement between income measures also indicates substantial misclassification, with Spearman's correlations, kappa coefficients and weighted kappa coefficients all indicating little agreement. The regression results show that the size of the coefficients changes considerably when area-based measures are used instead of household-level measures, and that use of area-based measures smooths out important variation across the income distribution.ConclusionThese results suggest that, in some contexts, the choice of area-based versus household-level income can drive conclusions in an important way. Access to reliable household-level income/socio-economic data such as the tax-validated data used in this study would unambiguously improve health research and therefore the evidence on which health and social policy would ideally rest.