Nod for 1L cr fund to boost post-harvest farm projects

NEW DELHI: The Cabinet on Wednesday approved an Agriculture Infrastructure Fund worth Rs 1 lakh crore to provide medium-to-long term debt financing facility for investment in projects for post-harvest management and community farming assets through interest subvention, financial support and moratorium on repayment.
The scheme will be for 10 years till financial year 2029.
Union agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar said, “Currently, nearly 20% of agricultural produce is lost in post-harvest period.Creating such infrastructure across the country would help farmers cut down the losses.”
Under this scheme, Rs 1 lakh crore will be provided by banks and financial institutions as loans to Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS), marketing cooperative societies, Farmer Producers Organisations (FPOs), self-help groups (SHGs), farmers, joint liability groups (JLG), multi-purpose cooperative societies, agri-entrepreneurs, start-ups, aggregation infrastructure providers and central/state agency or local body-funded public-private partnership projects.
The loans will be disbursed in four years starting with the sanction of Rs 10,000 crore in the current financial year and Rs 30,000 crore each in the next three financial years.
Tomar said all loans provided under this facility will have annual interest subsidy of 3% up to a limit of Rs 2 crore and this will be available for maximum seven years.
The total outflow as budgetary support from the Centre will be Rs 10,736 crore. The government said moratorium for repayment would be minimum of six months to maximum of two years.