నైరూప్య

Enabling Business of Agriculture via New Financing Technologies

Ankit Gupta*

Agriculture business in the coming years will pave a way to fulfill the food requirement of all as by 2050 world’s population will reach to around 9 billion. To feed such a large population our farmers must get the real benefits like of Financial, Technological, Machinery, on time credit, Vibrant supply chain, Schemes as per the changing trend of market. Currently around 800 million people go to bed hungry every day to overcome such drastic and inhumane conditions in near future which is supposed to be crueler to mankind, our farmers must produce a lot, increasing per hectare yield will be the main challenge and which can only be achieved by using latest technological tools, high quality fortified seeds. For this all our farmers institutions, Fintech sectors, govt. institutions, Machinery sector needs to come together to address this situation. To enable the agribusiness govt should develop user friendly regulations and schemes and at the same time they should be monitored continuously, this agribusiness supporting practices needs to incorporate farmers, firms, food industry, producers, vendors to facilitate selling and purchasing of goods and services.

Estimate suggest that demand for food will increase by around 68% by 2050. Today, growth of agricultural finance is constrained by major factors such as: i) Ineffective and not so accessible policies ii) Lack of backward integration towards farm gate and include a high cost iii) Low level of productivity due to fragmentation and iv) Lack of financial expertise and institutions which can provide a lot of agricultural loan portfolios. Time has come to give our agriculture community the respect and price they deserve to raise their living standard to bring them out of poverty. Government must develop financial cooperatives / Institutions which can strategically provide access to financial support like access to timely credit, insurance with the use of latest technological tools and keep a proper tab afterwards to properly recover those debts. To show case some of the best financial investment made by government we considered e-NAM and Kisan Call Center (KCC) in our thesis study and we will be looking upon the impact they are having on daily lives of a farmer all over India.