Scale and Efficiency of Co-operative Credit for Agriculture in Thane District of Maharashtra

This study has estimated the credit requirement and credit utilization pattern of farm households along with credit gap in six villages of Thane district in Maharashtra. Based on the study of 90 borrowers, the overall production credit requirement for first criteria of 100 per cent variable cost, 75 per cent of variable cost and third criteria of excluding family labour cost was found to be 22389, 16792 and 17403, respectively. This implied that credit requirement based on first and third criteria was in favour of the borrowers, whereas, second criteria was in favour of financial institutions. The credit gap analysis revealed that among the three criteria considered for the production credit requirements, 100 per cent variable cost and excluding family labour cost criteria should be adopted while advancing credit for the rice crop which also has a high proportion of hired labour cost. The logit regression analysis has revealed that the variables working and non-working members, consumption expenditure, use of credit for un-productive purpose, proportion of overdue to total loan and proportion of overdue to total income had a significant influence on the probability of being a non-defaulter.