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.
Cash-in Benefits of the Kisan Credit Card Scheme: Onus is Upon the Farmer
The introduction of modern technology to agricultural sector has led to intensive use of inputs and the package of practices, resulting in manifold increase in the requirement of production credit. Credit from informal sources is available but with strings attached to it. Thus realising this fact, Government of India in 1969 nationalised fourteen major banks and six more were added to this category in 1980. In spite of the various measures to rejuvenate farm credit, the flow of credit to agriculture sector remained quantitatively and qualitatively poor. The institutional sources of credit meet 51 per cent of the credit requirements of the farm sector (Rao, 2003). The non-institutional sources were mainly approached by the farmers due to lack of security assets with them, frequent needs, inadequate supply of institutional credit, undue delays, sophisticated procedure and malpractices adopted by institutional lending agencies (Singh, 1971; Singh H., 1971; Singh, 1973; Sharma, 1978; Nahatkar et al., 2002; Rao, 2003). With a view to inquire into the reasons for the tailbacks of the farm credit and suggest measures for improving the delivery systems as well as simplification of the procedures for farm credit, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had set up one man High Level Committee of Shri R.V. Gupta in December 1997. The Committee submitted its report in April 1998. It was against the background of this Committee’s report that RBI in 1998 directed all Public Sector Banks (PSBs), Regional Rural Banks (RRBs) and co-operative banks to introduce Kisan Credit Card Scheme (KCCS) on the lines of the model scheme formulated by National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) and in due course of time the KCCS was adopted by all the directed agencies. At the all India level, the cumulative number of Kisan Credit Cards (KCCs) issued by all the implementing agencies as of, March 31, 2004, stood at 413.79 lac (Government of India, 2003-04), and the corresponding figure for Punjab was 13.88 lac (88th Meeting of State Level Bankers’ Committee). The KCCS aims at extending adequate and timely support from banking system to the farmer, to meet the crop production and ancillary activities. The credit limit