10
bankers should also capture information on total land with the farmer, irrigated
land, land offered for KCC loan, land offered for land mortgage, etc., in their
CBS.
5.
Digitization of land records must be completed at the earliest possible time.
6.
The farmers’ reluctance to avail higher amount of KCC limits (above Rs. 1.0 lakh)
is also on account of bank’s insistence of land mortgage of entire land offered for
KCC loan. Banks should mortgage only required quantity of land, sufficient to
cover the bank loan.
7.
Farmers were found less enthusiastic about the crop insurance scheme due to
delay in settlement/ no compensation of claims by the insurance companies.
Further, since crop insurance is available only for notified crops, bankers also
prefer to show only notified crops in the appraisal form while calculating the
KCC limit. But farmers do not get claim when they grow different crops and
loss is occurred during that year. It is suggested that bankers may be little extra
careful while considering the crops being suggested by the farmers for fixation of
the KCC limit, particularly in areas which are prone to natural calamities.
8.
The present campaign of covering 3 crore farmers under RuPay cards by 31
March 2017 has been taken in a positive spirit by all the banks. All the commercial
banks and RRBs are already issuing RuPay cards to farmers. Due to proactive
support by NABARD and NPCI, the number of cooperative banks issuing RuPay is
also expected to go up to 150 by March 2017. However, creating card acceptance
infrastructure in rural areas in the required quantity is still a challenge which
needs to be addressed to at the earliest possible time in order to increase the
transactions through RuPay cards.
9.
As of now, the National Financial Switch (NFS)/ ATMs dominates the KCC
transactions accounting for as high as 98.14 per cent with a negligible share of
Point of Sale (POS) devices and RuPay Pay Secure (E-Commerce operations).
Interoperability of Micro-ATMs and POS devices are major hurdles in up scaling
the use of the devices. This is one area where both the bankers as well as NPCI
have to work in close coordination with each other as only 8 banks have gone live
till date.
10. The availability of RuPay card at the branch level has been found to be one of
the major reasons for slow progress in issuance of RuPay cards by the branch
manager. The controlling offices of various banks need to expedite their efforts
in supplying the cards in sufficient quantity at the branches in a planned manner
keeping in view of government’s thrust on cashless transactions.
11. Some hesitation on the part of the farmers to avail RuPay cards on account of
their fear of misuse of their RuPay cards could be addressed by adopting one of
the following strategies:
