NABARD – Highlights of 2011-12 - Developmental Intervensions

Promotional Activities:
During 2011-12, NABARD released Rs. 232.57 lakh of grant support for conducting 520 marketing events like Exhibitions and Melas for rural artisans, taking the cumulative figure to 1,818 and disbursements to Rs. 875.96 lakh. Further, during the year, 9,852 rural entrepreneur development programmes were supported, benefiting rural youth and involving release of grant assistance of Rs. 1,309 lakh, bringing the cumulative grant assistance to Rs.96.45 crore, for conducting 27,711 such training programmes covering 6,92,775 rural youth. Also, 56 Rural Marts were established with financial assistance released from NABARD to the tune of Rs. 82.48 lakh, thus taking the cumulative number of rural marts to 513 and total assistance disbursed to Rs. 320 lakh. Apart from this, 50 Rural Haats were sanctioned grant assistance of Rs. 248.50 lakh during the year thus bringing the cumulative number to 331 Haats with the grant assistance of Rs. 1,482 lakh. During the year 2011-12, six participatory clusters were approved with a grant assistance of Rs. 90 lakh. Sector wise, nearly 50% of the clusters are in the Handloom sector while Handicrafts have 41 clusters and the new areas brought under the cluster are rural tourism, food processing and marketing.

Rural Innovations
NABARD supports rural innovations from out of its Rural Innovation Fund (RIF) since 2005 to promote innovations across the country, having the rural poor in focus. During the year, 2011-12, 80 innovative projects were sanctioned, taking the cumulative number of innovative projects sanctioned to 455. An amount of Rs.10.18 crore has been disbursed during the year 2011-12 taking cumulative disbursements to Rs. 43.03 crore this year.

Institutional Development – Regional Rural Banks (RRBs)
NABARD has facilitated 100% Core Banking Solution in 80 RRBs to integrate them with NEFT and RTGS and improve better customer service and operational efficiency. Further, recapitalisation assistance to the tune of Rs.1,012 crore has been released to 16 RRBs falling short of CRAR at 9%. NABARD is also coordinating with Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS) for recruitment of staff and officers in RRBs and has been entrusted with the responsibility for Coordination and Supervision of the selection process besides finalisation of methodology.

Institutional Development – Short term and Long term Cooperatives
NABARD has advised the SCARDBs that with reference to the year 2012-13, their audit would be carried out by the Chartered Account Firms and refinance to the SCARDBs will be released accordingly. Under the GoI's Revival Package for Short Term Cooperative Credit Structure (STCCS), an amount of Rs. 9,003 crore has been released by NABARD as GoI share for recapitalisation of 54,715 PACS in seventeen States and 13 CCBs. Common software for accounting has been finalised by NABARD and sent to 20 States for implementation. Training has been imparted to nearly 3.5 lakh personnel from the STCCS in business development and profitability, change management, CAS/MIS and other relevant areas. Studies have shown that these measures have lead to increase in volume of business and credit flow of CCS entities besides cleansing their balance sheets, improved governance and increase in coverage of SF/MF and borrowing membership. The outreach to Small and Marginal farmers has increased from 10% in 2004 (Pre-reform) to 25% in 2008. Assistance under the Cooperative Development Fund has been provided by way of disbursement of Rs. 20.77 crore for the year 2011-12. This assistance has been given separately for training and capacity building of officials of Cooperatives for various skill building initiatives. The cumulative disbursement under CDF was Rs. 108.38 crore as on 31 March 2012.

Core Banking Solutions (CBS) for Cooperatives
The State level and district level cooperative banks would require very high initial investment both in terms of technology, infrastructure as well as manpower training. They would need to bring in technology partners with the potential capacity to realize a project at this scale. Recognising the difficulty of individual cooperative banks to engage with large technology providers, NABARD has started a programme to help the cooperative banking system migrate to the CBS platform. In the first phase of this initiative, NABARD has brought together 140 co-operative banks under the programme.

The major objectives of the programme are: