Bhubaneswar: The first survey on India’s financial inclusion undertaken by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) and released by the NITI Aayog has recently indicated that the income of farming families of rural India has gone up considerably.
The survey which also studied 12 districts of Odisha including Puri, Boudh, Raygada, Sambalpur, Angul, Jagatsingpur and Khurda claims that the rural population of these districts are more inclined towards saving their incomes rather than spending on investments.
The report said, “Over 75 per cent of households in states like West Bengal and Odisha have saved money despite low income levels and low levels of consumption expenditure.”
The report which studied samples in 2015-16 also found indebtedness as high as 54 per cent in families having cultivable land and the proportion is higher in terms of the size of national level figures.
The survey claims that the average land size held by the agricultural households stood at 0.7 hectare in Odisha where the farmers had a tendency to lease out their land to cultivators. While 14 states such as Nagaland, Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab have higher land size than the all India average land size, 13 states such as Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha have lower land size than the national average.
Referring to the debt pattern, the report said, “States like Telangana (79%), Andhra Pradesh (77%), and Karnataka (74%) showed higher levels of indebtedness than in other states. The debts are considerably higher in states like Arunachal Pradesh (69%), Manipur (61%), Tamil Nadu (60%), Kerala (56%), and Odisha (54%) where more than half of the households were found to be indebted at the time of the survey.”
The survey also highlighted that in Odisha 53 per cent of people who saved money were women and the average monthly income of the rural population stands at Rs 7, 241 while the surplus it gets after their monthly investment is about Rs 1,628. Compared to the national average of spending and investment pattern, Odisha reports less expenditure per month than other states.
PNN