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Food minister Piyush Goyal launches platform to enable loans against produce to farmers
Food minister Piyush Goyal launches 'e-Kisan Upaj Nidhi' digital platform for farmers to get loans against produce, aims to boost income and modernize agriculture.
Food and consumer affairs minister Piyush Goyal on Monday launched a digital platform to facilitate farmers in getting loans against their produce stored in registered godowns and said it would help boost the farming community’s income and make agriculture an attractive proposition.
The minister also announced that the Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority (WDRA) would soon lower the security deposit paid by the warehouse owner to 1% of the value of the stock from the current 3%.
At an event here, Goyal launched the digital gateway named ‘e-Kisan Upaj Nidhi’, which aims to facilitate farmers in obtaining post-harvest loans from banks against their stocks stored in the WDRA registered warehouses.
The loans are provided against electronic negotiable warehouse receipts (e-NWRs). At present, there are more than 5,500 registered warehouses under WDRA, while the total number of agri-warehouses is estimated at around 1 lakh.
The minister emphasised the need to modernise Indian agriculture through the use of technology to enhance farmers’ income. This will also help in making the farm sector an “attractive proposition”.
With the launch of this gateway, Goyal said the farmers will easily get loans at 7% interest rate, without any collateral.
“Farmers can sell their produce stored in warehouses at the right time. Farmers would also not be forced to sell their crops in distress,” he said.
Banks onboarded on digital gateway will provide a choice to farmers in terms of rate of interest and loan amount.
Goyal said the security deposit for warehouses will be soon reduced to 1% from 3%.
The minister said the world’s largest grain storage capacity programme has been launched in cooperative sector and asked the WDRA to register the godown established by cooperatives without any fee.
He said the godowns maintained by Food Corporation of India (FCI), Central Warehousing Corporation (CWC) and WDRA are modern but asked them to make their quality parameters more stringent.
He noted that the procurement of foodgrains and other crops from farmers at minimum support price (MSP) has jumped 2.5 times from the previous government.
