Institutional lending to agriculture and allied activities has recorded a significant growth during the last two decades due to the aggressive policy of the government in expanding credit to agriculture. The following figure depicts the growth in agricultural credit distributed by the STCCS:  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  12.
Lending by cooperative credit institutions grew much faster than that by other banks during the 1990s. Thereafter, their share has been declining since 2007–08. Despite this fall, cooperatives clearly remain the major source of agricultural credit to small and medium farmers in terms of the number of borrowers and size of individual loans. Problems of cooperatives 13.