The Farm Loan Story
Farmers in India need to be ready with the finances to purchase seeds, fertilizers, and farm equipment. And, perhaps in a country that heavily depends on agriculture, 7% of loan books are mandated to farmers. This amounts to thousands of loan applications that banks have to process, which makes them overburdened with customer requests. The country’s largest private bank disburse as much as 20 lakh crores (USD 265 billion) every year.
“And into the field, I go to lose my mind and find my soul,” proclaims every farmer as they go harvest the gold from the green lushes. In Maharashtra, India, hectic preparations for the farming season begin in June with the monsoons. This is ‘that’ time of the year when farmers sweat it out to build their fortune and secure the daily meals.
But, only if sweat was enough to get the fruits they desired!
No matter how hard they work, the main struggle that refrains them from securing their crops is the financial burden.
Farmers need to be ready with the finances to purchase seeds, fertilizers, and farm equipment. And, perhaps in a country that heavily depends on agriculture, 7% of loan books are mandated to farmers. This amounts to thousands of loan applications that banks have to process, which makes them overburdened with customer requests. The country’s largest banks disburse as much as 20 lakh crores (USD 265 billion) every year.
Huge money creates more enormous potholes of possible frauds, creating graver nightmares. Banks are bogged down with the gargantuan task of processing loan applications error-free after weaning out fraudulent claims.
And the superhero to save them from this mammoth task is – automation, proving time and again that technology is truly painting a brighter future for humans!
Thankfully the government has digitized farmer’s land records that are posted in a portal. Farmers submit their loan applications in person at the local branch, with an attached copy of land record, created by the Village Patwari Head. The loan application form has details such as the acreage of land, the village’s name, and the tehsil district details. These farmers live in 43700 villages in 358 tehsils across the state.
“And into the field, I go to lose my mind and find my soul,” proclaims every farmer as they go harvest the gold from the green lushes. In Maharashtra, India, hectic preparations for the farming season begin in June with the monsoons. This is ‘that’ time of the year when farmers sweat it out to build their fortune and secure the daily meals.
But, only if sweat was enough to get the fruits they desired!
No matter how hard they work, the main struggle that refrains them from securing their crops is the financial burden.
Farmers need to be ready with the finances to purchase seeds, fertilizers, and farm equipment. And, perhaps in a country that heavily depends on agriculture, 7% of loan books are mandated to farmers. This amounts to thousands of loan applications that banks have to process, which makes them overburdened with customer requests. The country’s largest banks disburse as much as 20 lakh crores (USD 265 billion) every year.
Huge money creates more enormous potholes of possible frauds, creating graver nightmares. Banks are bogged down with the gargantuan task of processing loan applications error-free after weaning out fraudulent claims.
And the superhero to save them from this mammoth task is – automation, proving time and again that technology is truly painting a brighter future for humans!
Thankfully the government has digitized farmer’s land records that are posted in a portal. Farmers submit their loan applications in person at the local branch, with an attached copy of land record, created by the Village Patwari Head. The loan application form has details such as the acreage of land, the village’s name, and the tehsil district details. These farmers live in 43700 villages in 358 tehsils across the state.
Using natural language processing, these records in the local language Marathi are translated into English, stored in the bank database. Using RPA, these translated records are then compared and matched to the records in the Mahabhulekh government portal. Once validated, the loan application continues on its journey forward.
The bank database has a memory, which once created, remembers prior loan disbursals, previous defaults—eliminating the need to recreate a new database every year. Before RPA touched their lives, this entire process used to be manual, tedious, and prone to errors involving lengthy, clerical data entry, where language translation magnified the risks.
Manual validation and reconciliation were the rate-limiting steps in the workflow, not actually helping the situation, rather making it worse at times. Today our banks can focus on efficient, accurate, fraud-free loan disbursals – and the credit again goes to the technological enablement.
So, to conclude, as torch-bearers of digitization, there is no denying that technology is just not limited to targeting the low-hanging fruits anymore. Technology is shaping the future of all industries, including the most traditionally driven one that is farming. So, undoubtedly, the new dawn of farmers advocating the human-tech symbiosis is not far away!
