The Union Budget 2024-25 as provided a significant allocation of ₹1.52 lakh crore to agriculture and allied sectors. This underscores the government’s commitment to empower farmers with affordable credit, ensuring availability of seeds of high-yielding varieties, natural farming and self-sufficiency in pulses and oilseeds.
The small and marginal farmers who are members of cooperative societies, farmer producer organisations and joint liability groups are to be taken in the fold collectively to meet their need for credit, infrastructure and market.
The collectivisation of producers, resources and farm produce presents an opportunity for an integrated approach to development.
Access to credit
Per Economic Survey 2024, the total credit disbursed to agriculture in 2024 is ₹22.84 lakh crore with ₹13.67 lakh crore allocated to crop loans and ₹9.67 lakh crore to term loans.
The District Central Cooperative Bank (DCCB ) have given ₹3.36 lakh crore as loans and advances to the members of the cooperative societies. District Central Cooperative Banks (DCCB ) and Primary Agriculture Credit Societies (PACS) have played a significant role in addressing the credit, input and market needs of farmers.
PACS are now set to diversify into dairy, fishery, floriculture, setting up godowns, procurement of foodgrains, fertilizers, seeds, LPG/CNG/Petrol/Diesel distributorship, common service centres, Fair Price Shops (FPS), and Business Correspondent activities.
The computerisation of 63,000 PACS will bring its operation on ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) based common national software, linking them with NABARD through State Cooperative Banks (StCBs) and DCCBs. This will enable dispensing financial services for short, medium and long-term loans, procurement operations, PDS operations, business planning, warehousing, merchandising, borrowings, and asset management.
The Budget emphasised the importance of Digital Public infrastructure (DPI) in agriculture. The computerisation of PACS on common national software needs to have a pathway for integration with DPI for enhancing short term and long-term credit.
A unified digital ecosystem enabling digital collaboration with various other government initiatives like DPI, Agri Stack, e-Nam, e-shram portal will help in achieving the goal of digital governance.
A cooperative tech stack comprising a platform for consolidation of data from various organisations like of credit societies, non-credit societies, cooperative banks, federations, service providers, training institutions, and regulatory bodies with the capability to have interoperability with Agri Tech Stack and others can make a difference.
Digital transformation entails the need for skilled manpower to work as data analysts, data entry operators, database managers, hardware and software maintenance, software developers, cyber security specialists, system administrators, consultants, technical consultants etc.
Skilling the youth and generating employment is one of the nine priorities of the Budget and has to be kept in mind while designing information technology projects.
Training courses, apprenticeships and internships amongst the youth are to be developed for them to take up employment in the cooperative sector.
The writer is Director, Vaikunth Mehta National Institute of Cooperative Management. Views are personal