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By:

Parashram Patil

14 January 2026 at 3:19:45 pm

Credit Scores for Farmer Health

India’s rural co-operatives are undergoing the biggest technological overhaul in their history. More than 61,000 Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) have now been integrated into a unified digital ERP platform under the Ministry of Co-operation, transforming once paper-bound village societies into data-driven financial hubs. PACS are no longer mere credit counters. Increasingly, they distribute fertilizers, run Jan Aushadhi centres, lease farm machinery and serve as the operating...

Credit Scores for Farmer Health

India’s rural co-operatives are undergoing the biggest technological overhaul in their history. More than 61,000 Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) have now been integrated into a unified digital ERP platform under the Ministry of Co-operation, transforming once paper-bound village societies into data-driven financial hubs. PACS are no longer mere credit counters. Increasingly, they distribute fertilizers, run Jan Aushadhi centres, lease farm machinery and serve as the operating system of the rural economy. Yet beneath this modernisation lies an old and largely ignored vulnerability. India’s agricultural-credit architecture has become adept at managing risks to crops, but not risks to cultivators themselves. Droughts, pest attacks and unseasonal rainfall are insured against. The body of the farmer, however, remains outside the balance sheet. That omission is becoming expensive. Measuring Farmer Health A growing body of thinking, described as the ‘Farmers Health Capital’ framework, argues that agricultural productivity cannot be measured purely through land, machinery and labour. Classical economics models farm output as a combination of technology, capital and labour: Y=f(A,K,L) But this assumes labour is mechanically constant. In reality, labour efficiency depends heavily on the physical condition of the worker. The revised framework therefore introduces a “health efficiency multiplier” modifying productivity into: Y=f(A,K,L\times H) Here, H represents the health stock of the cultivator. Under punishing heatwaves, pesticide exposure or chronic musculoskeletal strain, this stock depreciates rapidly. A farmer may physically work eight hours in a field during a 42°C heatwave, but the effective economic value of that labour may collapse by half. This sounds abstract until one examines the financial consequences. Across rural India, many short-term loan defaults are triggered not by crop failures but by medical emergencies. When illness strikes a farming household, repayment schedules are often ‘hijacked,’ meaning money meant for servicing crop loans is redirected towards hospital bills and urgent treatment. The result is a silent leak in the co-operative credit system. Traditional crop insurance protects against environmental shocks. It does little when the harvest succeeds but the cultivator collapses before reaching the mandi. A family that should have remained solvent suddenly becomes a non-performing asset (NPA) risk for its local PACS. As digitised co-operatives expand their lending operations, this human vulnerability threatens to scale with them. That is why some policy thinkers including myself are proposing a new mechanism: health-linked credit scorecards embedded directly into the PACS digital infrastructure. The idea is when farmers visit their local PACS to purchase inputs or manage seasonal credit, they could undergo rapid occupational-health assessments through digital interfaces integrated into the ERP system. The software would then generate a “Health Capital Rating” based on factors such as heat exposure, ergonomic strain and safe pesticide practices. Farmers who adopt protective behaviours would earn “Health Capital Credits.” These could translate into tangible banking incentives, including lower interest rates on crop loans. Low Cost The attraction of the proposal lies partly in its low cost. Because the national PACS digital network already exists, advocates argue that the model could initially be tested as a software-layer upgrade rather than a major new welfare scheme. A pilot across high-stress agricultural belts such as Vidarbha could examine whether health-linked monitoring actually reduces default rates over a single crop cycle. Climate change magnifies this distortion. Heatwaves do not merely reduce crop yields; they directly erode labour productivity. Under severe thermal stress, the human body diverts energy toward cooling itself, accelerating fatigue and impairing cognitive function. For smallholders already operating on thin margins, the biological cost of farming is becoming economically destabilising. India’s co-operative ecosystem is uniquely positioned to operationalise such an approach. Large federations like IFFCO already possess deep distribution networks across rural India. Dairy unions modelled on Amul and sugar co-operatives in western India have a direct financial interest in maintaining the physical resilience of their producer base. A healthier cultivator is not merely a social good; he is a more reliable borrower, supplier and economic actor. Critics may worry about creating a two-tier rural credit structure where physically vulnerable farmers are penalised rather than protected. Others will question whether the state should integrate biometric health data into financial decision-making at all. Yet the central insight behind the proposal remains powerful. India’s rural-credit debate has long focused on waivers, subsidies and insurance. Far less attention has been paid to the biological fragility underlying agricultural finance itself. The computerisation of PACS offers an opportunity to rethink that equation. (The writer is a member of Maharashtra Agriculture Price Commission. Views personal.)

Endless Inner Echoes

A Kolkata-based entrepreneur and a featured author in eminent media houses, Rajeev Kejriwal, presents a rare confluence of industry and introspection. Writing primarily in Hindi, his poetry navigates universal emotional terrains like restlessness, solitude, memory, and the self with a quiet intensity. His work does not seek comfort; it unsettles, provokes, and invites readers to confront their own unspoken truths. His acclaimed poetry collection Antheen (meaning Endless) has been widely appreciated for its minimalist expression and emotional depth. An English translation of the collection is set to release soon, aiming to reach a broader audience. Excerpts…

 

Poetry often comes from deep emotion. What inspires your verses the most?

Inspiration, for me, is rarely a grand moment. It’s usually a quiet moment of solitude or equally a moment of disturbance—something that doesn’t settle. A question that hangs in the air, a silence heavier than words—and at times, just emptiness. I write because something within refuses to be resolved.

 

How would you describe your poetic voice or style in your own words?

I believe my voice lives somewhere between what is said and what escapes being said. Minimal on the surface, with an undercurrent of unease… and involves the reader in its search. I’m drawn to pauses, to absences, to incompleteness.

 

Do your books emerge from personal experiences, observations, or imagination? Tell me about your books.

A combination of all three, but not in a linear way. Personal experience leads to focused observation, observation dissolves into vivid imagination—and somewhere in between, a poemstarts taking shape instantly.

My work, especially Antheen, it’s more about capturing states of being—detachment, longing, quiet anger, or nostalgia. If there’s a thread across my books, it’s this idea of something endless—but in feeling.

 

Is there a particular poem of yours that is closest to your heart? Why?

Yes—but not because it is the most polished. The ones closest to me are often the ones that feel unfinished, almost fragile. Like “Tukde Tukde” is a poem where the question outweighs the answer, where the silence in words and action holds more weight than the written words.

 

How do you approach the process of writing a poem? Does it come spontaneously or through careful crafting?

It almost always begins spontaneously—a line, a thought, a certain emotional rush. But writing doesn’t end there.

I return, not to decorate it, but to strip it down. Remove the extras, like a sculptor removing the unwanted parts from a slab of stone to reveal the statue. The process is more about uncovering what was already there, hidden beneath noise.

 

Many believe poetry is losing space in today’s fast-paced world. How do you respond to that?

It’s the attention span., and poetry has always lived in spaces where attention is fragile. poetry becomes almost necessary in a fast-paced life, - crisp, minimal words to express thoughts, emotions, —not as an escape, but as resistance, asking you to pause. It will always find those who are willing to stop and listen- to their heart.

 

Which poets or literary traditions have influenced your work the most?

Less names, more sensibilities. That said, works that embrace restraint and depth whether in Hindi, Urdu, or even certain modern minimalist voices have stayed with me, where a single line can hold an entire emotional landscape.

 

What role does language play in your poetry? Do you think differently when writing in different languages?

Language shapes the emotion itself.

Hindi, for me, carries a certain intimacy and rawness. English offers distance and structure. The poem chooses its own language and sometimes, it lives in both, and that’s where translations come.

 

What themes or ideas are you currently exploring in your upcoming work?

The distance, - lately, I find myself returning to it, not just between people, but more within the self. A kind of quiet disconnection that isn’t dramatic, but persistent.

I’m also exploring memory how it shapes us, distorts us, and sometimes traps us. As something unresolved, as something that remained unsaid at that point of time.

Few of my poems have a humorous touch too as you will find in “Dasvi Pass” or “Dawa Daru” I write not to answer, but to sit with what refuses to resolve.

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