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concentrate on results as they emerge from the comparative official series.
For analytical purposes, we work out from these agricultural credit data their
growth, the relative contributions of different agencies – cooperatives, RRBs,
and commercial banks – towards crop loans and investment credit, and what is
more, relate them to agricultural inputs, capital formation and GDP originating
in the sector.
1. Changing Roles of Cooperatives and Commercial Banks: 1970s to the
Latest
For this section, we rely on two sets of data. The first set consists of
long time series from the early 1970s to capture the flow and stock numbers of
agricultural bank loans subsequent to bank nationalisation. Such an overview
is possible only from the RBI’s data disseminated through its Handbook of
Statistics on the Indian Economy. The initial part of the section makes use of
these data for a review of the banking system’s performance in the delivery of
agricultural credit.
However, as explained in an earlier paragraph, there is a kink in
the above series after 1994-95. We, therefore, attempt a detailed review
of the trends and compositional changes in agricultural lendings based on
continuous time series only on ground-level flow of agricultural credit from
all institutional agencies from 1991-92 onwards as published by NABARD by
from time to time. As explained earlier, these also differ significantly from the
RBI data series from its Handbook of Statistics. However, this NABARD set of
data series appears consistent and the trends revealed by them would have, we
hope, some meaningful results.
Annexures I and J depict the changing roles of different agencies in
agricultural credit over the 40-year period 1970-71 to 2011-12. Annexure I
presents shares of cooperatives, RRBs and commercial banks in loans issued
separately for short-term and long-term credit as well as for the aggregate
farm credit. Annexure J repeats the same distribution of credit by different
agencies for loans outstanding (as distinguished from loans issued). While
these Annexures thus provide relative shares by agencies and by type of loans,
Annexure K depicts relative proportions of short-term and term loans in the
aggregate for all agencies, but separately for loans issued and loans outstanding;
this annexure also presents all annual data as percentages of agricultural GDP.
The above set of data put together provide us an insight into the changing
roles of different types of farm loans and different types of banking institutions.
These data, for instance, vouchsafe for the expanding role of commercial banks
