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Highlights of the report

Agricultural indebtedness if not the root cause of the crisis but only a symptom and hence needs to be dealt in its totality.

Though immediate credit and non-credit relief measures addressing the farming community are essential, the design and delivery system should be strengthened.

Rescheduling of loans and relieving of interest burden up to two years in the case of farmers affected by natural calamities, drought conditions in rainfed areas and farmers in distress due to production crisis resulting from a multitude of risks are essential one time measures.

In many parts of the country farmers are burdened with high proportion of indebtedness to high interest bearing informal sources like moneylenders.

The expert group recommends the initiation of the process in the distressed districts by creating ‘Moneylenders Debt Redemption Fund’.

Recommends institutional ‘financial inclusion’ of the farming community on a mission mode.

One of the key recommendations of the expert group is improvement of the rural financial architecture that would improve timely and adequate delivery of credit to farmers by reducing transaction costs and improving the credit absorbtive capacity.

A major recommendation of the group is improved deployment of Rural Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF). The Expert Group recommends that based on the model of self help group (SHG) federations of poor in Andhra Pradesh, the state governments should make efforts to facilitate the formation of federations of SHGs for farmers, especially for small and marginal.

Expenditure on health is one of the sources of farmers’ distress and the group recommends farmers’ health insurance scheme on the lines of the one implemented in states like Karnataka.

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