Union Minister for Fisheries, Animal husbandry and Dairying, Parshottam Rupala officially launched the Nationwide AHDF KCC Campaign for 2023-24 through virtual mode on Wednesday. Around 1 lakh farmers joined the awareness program virtually from Common Service Centers.
Rupala also interacted with beneficiaries of AHDF-KCC connected through CSC and State Animal Husbandry Department. This step will further help in extending KCC facility to all small landless farmers engaged in animal husbandry and fisheries activities, claimed a PIB release.
In order to expand the benefit of Kisan Credit Card to all eligible animal husbandry, dairy and fishery farmers in the country, Ministry along with Department of Fisheries (DOF) and the Department of Financial Services (DFS), is organizing a “Nationwide AHDF KCC Campaign” from 1st May 2023 to 31st March, 2024.
The circular conveying the detailed guidelines for organizing this campaign has been issued to States in March. The necessary instructions to banks as well as State Government have also been issued by the Department of Financial Services, says govt sources.
The campaign for providing Kisan Credit Card facility to all eligible Animal Husbandry and Fishery Farmers was first launched in June 2020. As a result, more than 27 lakhs fresh KCC were sanctioned to Animal Husbandry and Fishery Farmers thereby providing an organizational credit facility to them to meet their working capital requirement.
The Kisan Credit Card scheme is a Government of India scheme which provides farmers with timely access to credit. The Kisan Credit Card (KCC) scheme was launched in 1998 with the aim of providing short-term formal credit to farmers and was created by NABARD (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development).
The KCC scheme was introduced to ensure that the credit requirements for farmers in the agriculture, fisheries and animal husbandry sector were being met. This was done by helping them avail short-term loans and provide them with a credit limit to purchase equipment and for their other expenses as well.
Moreover, with the help of KCC, farmers are exempt from the high interest rates of the regular loans offered by banks as the interest rate for KCC starts as low as 2% and averages at 4%. With the help of this scheme, farmers can repay their loans depending on the harvesting period of their crop for which the loan was given.