Demand for Agricultural Credit: A Study in the District of South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India

Abstract

Agriculture is a vital sector of Indian economy and agricultural credit plays an indirect but instrumental role in increasing agricultural productivity. It has been pointed out that access to credit for vast majority of rural farming households in India has been very poor in terms of proportion of borrowing households in the total agricultural households. In the present paper, situation of rural agricultural credit of the farmer households has been explored based on the primary survey conducted in the saline zone of the district of South 24 Pgs in the state of West Bengal in India. The findings from the primary survey reveal that many farmer households have no access to formal credit and still depend very much on informal sources of credit. The results of the analysis suggest that some of the factors affecting the credit amount taken by the surveyed households are access to irrigation, Kisan Credit Card, availability of different types of credit, number of dependent members, food security status, average rate of interest charged by different sources for the households.