Emerging Players In Farm Credit Market & Wish For New Beginning
We live in a nation with the highest milk production and an expected cumulative annual growth rate of 13 per cent or even higher. We are the second largest producer of wheat and rice and the largest producer of cereals. A source from the ministry of agriculture and farmers welfare has said that the government has pumped in around 10 lakh crore rupees in terms of credit and insurance to farmers and of making difference on the ground, but a continuous support from public and private sector is always a welcome step. It is our collective responsibility and we cannot get away from it.
Reality disturbs all, farming distress has attracted a class of neo-moneylenders--anyone with some disposable cash. From ‘shopkeepers’ and the ‘input dealers’, ‘government officials’ to the ‘policemen’ and ‘village teachers’ now lend money in the hope that they make a killing. They are willing to extend credit, but at highly extortionate rates--sometimes exceeding 50 per cent, which keeps borrowers in lifelong destitution.
Farmers who fall into the money lending trap find themselves locked in a nationally known as white-knuckle gamble, juggling ever larger loans at usurious interest rates, in the hope that someday a bumper harvest will allow them to clear their debts, possibly a hope that let them live and let them practice again—so they can take up new ones. But there seems no sign of the rainbow as the farmer continues to chase this vain illusion.
Shylock demanded only a pound of flesh, but loan shark bay for blood. Crushing debts are pushing farmers into the darkest of pits. There is a story that has now become a farmland fable. A man ploughing the field was so distressed that at first, he sold his kidney to an organ mafia—including doctors and hospitals—which sold the organ to a desperate patient for an insane amount. When the farmer found that the price of his kidney could not take him very far, he had no choice but to tie a noose around his neck.
Moneylenders operate in a variety of ways. In sharp contrast to banks and other lending institutions, there are no steel and glass buildings, neither are there any leather couches or coffee vending machines at the moneylender’s workplace. Vithal Radke’s business is registered as a shop because he hasn’t met the legal standards required to call it a finance agency.
Vithal stumbled into the moneylending business eight years ago after failing at a number of other businesses, mentions Moin in his book Village Diary of a Heretic Banker.
He doesn’t look like how you would imagine a loan shark which, to most, is cunning, tough, maybe with a streak of violence running underneath the refined exterior. “It has always been business as usual. Shylocks are still in great demand,” Vithal says. “Shylocks give you that instant fix. You aren’t asked security or guarantors. I borrowed again this year and it is going well. I think that because of the ease of it, borrowing becomes addictive,” says a cash-strapped farmer. Hope that this financial year will bring happiness on those faces who spared their day and night in farm fields to erase hunger from our homes.
(Inspired by Moin Qazi’s book Village Diary of a Heretic Banker)
