Perception of Specialist Agriculture Officers towards Agricultural Credit- A Comparative Study between Public and Private Sector Banks in Tamil Nadu, India

This paper attempts to analyse the perceptions of Specialist officers (Agriculture) towards Agriculture credit in public and private sector banks in Tamil Nadu. Among different zones in Tamil Nadu, Coimbatore zone was selected purposively for this study, because of its representation of maximum number of branches and credit activities. Purposive sampling of 150 Specialist officers (Agriculture) from various public sector banks and 51 Specialist officers (Agriculture) from private sector banks were selected for this study. In case of crop loan, about 91.35 per cent of Specialist Officers (Agriculture) from Public sector banks were satisfied with the disbursement of credit based on scale of finance as against 78.42 per cent in case of Private sector banks. About 70.27 per cent of Specialist Officers (Agriculture) from Public sector banks faced lot of hardships to recover agricultural loans. 84.96 per cent of Specialist Officer (Agriculture) employed from Public sector banks perceived that farmers never responded to bank notice and phone calls in case of Special Mentioned Accounts (SMA) and Non Performing Assets (NPA). However, 71.86 per cent of Specialist Officers (Agriculture) employed in Private sector banks perceived that farmers never responded to bank notice and phone calls in case of SMA and NPA. Thus from the above study, following policy implications may be arrived (i.e) Up-gradation of land records and delivery of documents through online and documentation of loan process such as mortgage, issuing of non-encumbrance certificate and verification of patta land can be published through online