The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) will be offering Rs 5,000 crore of refinance scheme for lenders and financial institutions for ensuring finance to the beneficiaries belonging to its 2,150 watershed development projects.
The development finance body also allocated another Rs 5,000 crore for levelling-up Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS), building blocks of India’s cooperative banking structure, into multi service centres.
Nabard organised its first-ever ‘Digital Choupal’ on Monday on the eve of its 39th foundation day.
“In a move which will boost offtake of economic activities in areas grappling with reverse migration, concessional bank refinance to the tune of Rs 5,000 crore will be made available to banks and financial institutions for lending to beneficiaries in the 2,150 watershed development projects of Nabard,” a release said.
These projects cover rainfed area, watershed and tribal development project areas of 23.04 lakh hectares.
It also said that the concessional line of assistance will be available for three years from 2020-21 to 2022-23.
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Besides, Nabard also introduced a grant-led scheme to initiate the computerisation of PACS, which will help enabling these ground-level entities to offer seamless credit services to their farmer members.
It has allocated Rs 5,000 crore during FY21 for turning PACS into multi service centres, that are one point contact for meeting the varied needs of the farmers.
