Farmers making multiple visits to banks and standing for long hours in the queue to avail of agricultural credits—the norm for many years—is changing rapidly with the digitalisation of the process. The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) in collaboration with Vadodara-based agri-fintech startup 24X7 Moneyworks Consulting, is helping farmers access agri-credit digitally through ekisancredit (eKCC) portal. The platform is enabling paperless and real-time onboarding of the farmers.
The eKCC portal is designed for cooperative banks, PACS (primary agricultural credit societies) and RRBs (regional rural banks). It carries out Aadhaar authentication of farmers, land record validation and loans limits based on crop details and area under cultivation. The platform uses Reserve Bank Innovation Hub’s unified lending interface for digital land records, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) for Aadhaar authentication, e-KYC, e-sign and Aadhaar data vault for sanctioning loans. Till now, 91 banks have boarded the platform.
“The aim is to integrate all 350 banks engaged in disbursing agricultural credit onto the digital platform which would vastly reduce cost of processing of loan applications and ensure only genuine farmers get access to agri-credit,” Ranjeet Gautam, founder, MD & CEO, 24X7 Moneyworks Consulting, told FE. He said that talks are on to integrate the portal with agriculture ministry’s digital public infrastructure which consists of three databases—Geo-referenced village maps, crop sown registry and the farmers registry and Kisan Rin portal.
Nabard recently acquired a 10% stake in 24×7 Moneyworks Consulting for an undisclosed amount and this was also the first-ever investment in a bootstrapped startup. Bank officials said that conventional loan application processes for kisan credit card (KCC) holders are ‘fraught with inefficiencies’ such as multiple visits to banks by farmers, long turnaround time of three-four weeks and being paper-based.
A KCC provides farmers with affordable credit for purchasing seeds, fertilisers and pesticides. At present, there are 77.1 million operational KCC holders who have landholdings. In FY25, commercial banks, cooperatives and RRBs had disbursed over Rs 28.98 lakh crore, out of which around 60% was towards short-term crop loans. The rest was disbursed as investment loans in agriculture and allied sectors.
Gautam said that farmers do know about the scale of finance available for each crop in the district and through eKCC portal, farmers get to know the eligibility limits for the agri-loans. Besides the reduction in the loan processing cost, the portal also helps in tracking and preventing duplication of collateral free loans of `2 lakh as mandated by RBI available to farmers.
“Even if banks can reduce the limits of credit to farmers, they have to give reasons for it,” Gautam, who earlier worked with the public sector bank for over two decades, said. Through the portal, farmers are able to submit loan applications without visiting banks. The startup has also developed Agriculture Infrastructure Fund Interest Subvention (AIFIS)—a digital platform that automates the interest subsidy workflow under the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund of the agriculture ministry.