Excerpt

Rural Credit. Rohini Pande, January 2007, Paper. "In 2000, over seventy percent of India’s population, and roughly three quarters of its poor, lived in rural areas. The main livelihood in rural India remains agriculture, an activity characterized by significant time-lags in production and a high degree of sensitivity to weather conditions. These features of agricultural production make access to financial instruments critical to a rural household’s ability to smooth income shocks and make long-term productive investments. However, as is well known lenders’ inability to perfectly identify the credit-worthiness of potential borrowers and the cost of enforcing repayment places severe restrictions on rural households’ access to credit..." Link