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Because of this practice of withdrawal or even repayment in just one or two
installments, they don’t feel the need of having the KCC RuPay Cards.
(iv) Many of the small agricultural holdings in India are not viable. Given the
choice, the bankers willingly don’t extend KCC loans to unviable holding,
but the pressure from the government makes them to cover the agricultural
farmers under KCC loan. Bankers though sanction the loan to such farmers
but try to have control over the withdrawal of amount credited to their
accounts. Bankers feel that issuing RuPay card to such farmers would deny
the bankers the control over the amount in farmers’ account.
(v) The illiterate KCC holders didn’t feel comfortable in doing transactions at
ATM machines. These farmers were also afraid of misuse of their cards
even by their family members. Bankers were of the opinion that biometric
ATMs would be quite useful in rural areas but biometric ATMs were not
available in villages and therefore, there was lukewarm response from
bankers as well as the farmers towards issuance/availment of RuPay cards.
(vi) Further, as per latest guidelines of RBI, chip based cards should be issued
to the farmers. As of now, neither ATMs nor POS are available in sufficient
number. Also, vendors are finding it difficult to supply the cards in time.
Sometimes, it takes vendors 6 to 8 months to supply the chip based cards
after indenting it.
(vii) There were some absentee landlords/ farmers not residing in the villages.
These farmers were not cultivating their lands on their own and therefore,
were not very keen in getting RuPay Card issued.
(viii) It was also learnt that the bank/ branches which were not having ATMs
of their own bank were of the view that extending RuPay cards to every
farmers will add an extra expenditure to them if the farmers go beyond
the minimum number of free transactions (five) allowed on ATMs of other
banks.
4.31 The information/data provided by the sample bank branches indicated that all
the famers who were issued RuPay card had already been handed over the RuPay
cards. Although bankers were preferring the handing over of the RuPay cards to
farmers in branch premises only in order to avoid the delivery of cards in wrong
hands. Some branches (particularly commercial banks branches) had also sent
the RuPay cards by Post or through Banking Correspondents. Normally, bank
branches send a message to the farmers to collect the cards from the branches
itself. In case a village is far away, bank branch holds a camp and distribute the
RuPay KCC and PIN to the farmers.
4.32 In response to the question ‘whether branches were issuing the cards to all the
new borrowers?’, all the branch managers (except cooperative banks in Assam,
Bihar & Punjab) told that although their first priority was issuing the RuPay
cards to the new customers, they were also issuing RuPay cards to existing/old
customers who were regular in repayment.
