Farm Finance: How this Budget can give a push to rural credit, post-demonetisation

Just across the road from the sprawling, leafy campus of IIT-Madras lies the main office of Samunnati Financial Intermediation and Services on the first floor of a non-descript glass-fronted building. Led by Anil Kumar, an ex-banker with nearly 25 years of hands-on retail lending experience, it’s one of a handful of new-generation non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) breaking fresh ground in agricultural financing. Samunnati is the kind of institution that, with the right policy support, could be the key to reducing the role of cash in farm financing, while bringing vast numbers of borrowers currently ignored by mainstream banks into the ambit of formal credit.