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The Maharashtra Government is planning to raise a loan of about ₹2,500-3,000 crore from multilateral funding agencies for strengthening the cooperative and agri-marketing institutions in the State.
A senior Maharashtra Government official told BusinessLine that talks with the funding agencies are in advance stage. The funds would be used for further strengthening the Atal Mahapanan Vikas Abhiyan, which is the flagship programme of the Cooperative and Marketing Department. Under Atal Mahapanan, efforts are already underway to strengthen over 20,000 primary agricultural societies as 54 per cent of them are in poor financial shape.
All the stakeholders such as the State Government, NGOs, cooperatives and farmers are involved in this programme. The Maharashtra Co-operative Development Corporation, an SPV, has been set up to target transforming of 5,000 primary agriculture societies, the official said.
The official said that the State Government, in spite of having ₹4.6-lakh-crore debt, still has the capacity to raise more funds. Its borrowing norms are well within those set by the Finance Commission. After learning bitter lessons from PPP financing model for infrastructure development in the early 1990s, it has chosen to borrow from multilateral agencies for developing projects in the State.
Mumbai and Pune metro projects and the Nagpur-Mumbai expressway project are based on large borrowings from global funding agencies as their coupon rate is low, they don’t interfere in project implementation and never get into litigations.
Assam project
Last October, the Government of India and the World Bank had signed a $200-million loan agreement for the Assam Agribusiness and Rural Transformation Project for supporting the Government of Assam agri-business investments, increase agriculture productivity and market access, and enable small farm holders produce crops that are resilient to recurrent floods or droughts in the State.
The project will be implemented in over 16 districts of Assam with over 5,00,000 farming households getting direct benefit from the project.
At least 30 per cent women are expected to participate in project activities.
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