Farmers on their way to home after attending paddy field works. (Morung Photo)
Our Correspondent
Kohima | April 28
The Nagaland Agriculture Policy 2025 asserted that enhancing access to affordable credit and crop insurance is essential for financial inclusion, risk mitigation, and sustainable farmer livelihoods. This strategy strengthens financial access mechanisms, ensuring farmer-friendly credit and insurance models, while addressing Nagaland's land tenure challenges, banking infrastructure gaps, and financial literacy needs.
The Policy aim to conduct targeted financial literacy programs to educate farmers on available financial services, loan processes, and insurance schemes, with a focus on smallholders, women, and youth. The Policy announced to launch awareness campaigns and highlight the benefits of crop insurance and credit-linked schemes. It will expand digital financial services and mobile banking to improve access in remote areas.
The Department of Agriculture will play a facilitative and advocacy role to engage banks, financial institutions, and cooperatives to improve credit access for farmers. The department will facilitate engagements with banks and financial institutions
Advocate for farmer-specific loan products and financing models by engaging with rural banks, microfinance institutions, and cooperative banks.
Strengthen farmer linkages to credit schemes
The Policy will endeavour to improve farmer access to existing government-backed credit programs such as Kisan Credit Card (KCC), Agriculture Infrastructure Fund (AIF), Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) for credit-linked crop insurance.
It will engage with financial institutions and banks to promote farmer-friendly loan schemes and ensure that farmers are aware of available financial options and application processes. It will encourage collective approaches to Credit Access, promote group-based lending models through Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs), Self-Help Groups (SHGs), and cooperatives to improve bargaining power with financial institutions.
Enhancing crop insurance and risk mitigation
The Policy will facilitate broader access to tailored crop insurance mechanisms and enhanced risk management frameworks to support financial stability in the sector, strengthen linkages between farm loans and crop Insurance, encourage greater integration of crop insurance into agricultural credit frameworks, ensuring that farmers accessing loans are protected against yield loss, climate risks, and economic shocks.
The Policy will explore and encourage scalable, region-specific insurance models, including weather-indexed, parametric, and area-based insurance frameworks that align with Nagaland's agroecological zones and farming patterns.
The Department of Agriculture will engage with financial institutions, cooperative banks, and rural finance providers to strengthen the institutional framework for agricultural credit and risk management. It will work with the banks, financial institutes and cooperative banks to increase the presence of agriculture-focused financial services in rural areas. It will strengthen Government-Financial Institute Coordination for Agriculture Credit Facilitate partnerships between state government agencies, rural banks, and financial institutions to increase investment in agricultural credit programs, encourage risk-sharing models between banks and government schemes to improve farmer loan access.
The department will work with financial institutions and NGOs to promote basic financial literacy for farmers on formal credits, loan repayment and debt management, saving and insurance, integrate crop insurance and risk management with financial services and promote weather-indexed and area-based insurance models and reducing financial risk for smallholders.
