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A major uncertainty arises in cooperative sector data from the divergent
methods revealed in official literature on the treatment given to loans issued
and loans outstanding in respect of land development banks – SCARDBs and
PCARDBS. On an earlier occasion, we brought out how (see Table 5.5) the
RBI’s
Handbook
began to incorporate data in respect of these development
banks for the first time in 1990-2000, as a result of which there was a sudden
184% increase in total loans issued in respect of cooperatives in that year or
142% increase in loans outstanding. However, such a kink is not seen in the
NABARD’s ground-level data. It is not known if the SCARDBs and PCARDBs are
covered in the GLC data for cooperatives. One possible reasons why their data
are not so covered in GLC flow is that the latter do not cover indirect advances
in respect of cooperatives, whereas the bulk of SCARDBs and PCARDBs are
in the form of indirect advances (as explained earlier in Table 5.5). Be that
as it may, all of these put together raise uncertainties regarding the quality of
cooperative sector data too.
Total Ground-Level Credit Flow: State-Wise And Region-Wise Trends
Detailed data contained in Annexures P and Q are summed up in
Table 5.14, which presents a two-way classification of region-wise and agency-
wise GLC distribution, but this is possible only for the period up to 2005-06.
For the period after 2005-06, state-wise GLC data are not available agency-
wise. Hence, the two-way classification of GLC region-wise agency-wise could
not be done. Instead, a summary table – Table 5.15 – could be done for years
ranging from 1995-96 to 2010-11.
The first revelation in these data is the confirmation of the widely-known
feature of an acute interregional and inter-state disparities in the distribution of
agricultural credit disbursements, and what is more, their persistence. We have
used two real sector indicators to juxtapose the credit distribution data: state-
wise distribution of the number of farm households and similar distribution of
agricultural state incomes which have been presented and reviewed at length
in a subsequent sections. It is found that the highest proportions of farm
households in the country reside in central and eastern regions (30.6% and
23.6%, respectively in 2003), while these regions were provided with the lowest
shares of ground-level farm credit (16.1% and 6.3%) in 1995-96 amongst the
large-size regions; the latter proportions are even lower than the regions’
shares in agricultural gross state domestic product (GSDP) (at 22-23% and
17-19%). At the other extreme, the southern and northern regions enjoyed in
1995-96 the highest shares (37.4% and 20.7%) in farm credit but possessed
less than half of them as their proportions in the number of farm households
