The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) needs long-term finance to ensure flow of adequate funds to cooperatives and boost capital formation in agriculture.

Full-fledged funding of the National Rural Credit Long-Term Operations Fund and the National Rural Credit Stabilisation Fund are available options, says All-India Nabard Employees Association.

A delegation of the association met Jayant Sinha, Minister for State for Finance, in New Delhi recently and handed over a memorandum listing this and other demands.

In the backdrop of growing agrarian crisis with its attendant problems of dispensation of institutional agri credit, there is need to strengthen the organic relationship between the RBI and Nabard as it existed earlier.

There is a serious need for countries like India to invest more in adaptation and mitigation efforts, given the growing problems connected with climate change and its impact on agriculture.

Nabard is accredited as the first National Implementing Entity of the Green Climate Fund of the UN Framework Convention on Climate change.

Climate change As much as 28 per cent of Nabard’s cumulative disbursements have links with climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts. “The need of the hour is a dedicated low cost Climate Change Management Fund under Nabard with adequate fund support from the Centre,” the memorandum said.

In other demands, it said that both Nabard and cooperatives be exempted from payment of income-tax. They were not subjected to income-tax liability earlier.

Nabard is the only financial institution that has not gone for any significant recruitment in the last two decades in spite of hundreds of vacant posts, especially in the workmen cadre.

The average age of the staff is above 50. So there is an urgent need to go in for massive recruitment at all Nabard offices in India. The employee body wants compassionate appointments to be restored and all pending applications cleared favourably without further delay.

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