A new micro-credit policy
The 2015 proposal
Supply inputs on credit and ~10% of expected output as low-interest cash credit, recovered at sale through the card; waive on adverse events; pay subsidies at the point of sale.
Where it stands in 2026
The Kisan Credit Card (4% effective after subvention) and PM-KISAN income support deliver much of this, and recovered-at-sale credit is exactly how eNWR warehouse-receipt finance works. The evidence warns that blanket debt waivers damage credit culture — favouring the deck's conditional, transaction-linked design.
The open gap
Tenant farmers without land title remain largely excluded from formal credit.
The path to close it
The rails — KCC, PM-KISAN, eNWR finance — work for landowners; the hole is the tenant and oral lessee with no title. Score credit on transaction history and warehouse receipts rather than land, as Kenya's Apollo Agriculture does with satellite and repayment data, and scale Joint Liability Groups so the landless borrow as a group. Bundle each advisory with a crop-plan-linked credit line recovered at sale — and avoid blanket waivers, which the evidence shows wreck credit culture.
Sources
- ↗ PM-KISAN income support — Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare
- ↗ WDRA — Warehousing Development & Regulatory Authority (eNWR) — Govt. of India
- ↓ Access to Finance for Smallholder Farmers: Learning from the Experiences of Microfinance Institutions in Latin America — International Finance Corporation / World Bank, 2014
- ↗ What is the impact of rural bank credit access on the technical efficiency of smallholder cassava farmers in Ghana? — Heliyon (Elsevier, open access via PMC), 2021
- ↗ Master Circular — Kisan Credit Card (KCC) Scheme — Reserve Bank of India, 2018
- ↗ Apollo Agriculture — financing for profitable farming — Apollo Agriculture (Kenya), 2025