In the 1950s, non-institutional sources, particularly money lenders, accounted for virtually all the credit taken by cultivator households with only negligible credit flow from the formal institutional structure.
This situation had changed dramatically by the early 1980s, with formal financial institutions accounting for as much as 60 per cent of the total credit [Table 1].2 The gradual increase in the share of formal institutional credit in agriculture witnessed some reversal in the period between 1991 and 2002 mainly because of a pull back by commercial banks.