The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) released the second round of its All-India Rural Financial Inclusion Survey (NAFIS) 2021-22 in October 2024. This comes five years after its first edition, NAFIS 2016-17, which was released in 2019. The survey covers 1 lakh households in Tier 3 to Tier 6 cities in 28 states and 2 Union Territories, spreading over 710 districts and 10,000 village blocks.
While the survey focuses on the entire rural Indian population, it has disaggregated data for agricultural and non-agricultural households[1], which provides us with an opportunity to understand the relative position of agricultural households[2] in the rural economy of India. In this blog, we will highlight some interesting facts about agricultural households from the survey through a set of questions that can help contextualise the financial lives of farmers and their families. Through these questions, we intend to paint a picture of an average farming household in India, including their assets, incomes, income sources, debt, savings, investments, and future aspirations. This exercise at prototyping is essentially a reordering and reframing of information from the survey. We hope the answers to these questions from the survey will help researchers, practitioners, and commentators working in the field of agriculture and agriculture policy anchor their work to the needs of the average Indian farmer.
- Are most rural households agricultural?
- Who heads agricultural households, thereby exerting considerable influence over their farming and non-farming decisions?
- How much land do agricultural households own?
- How are agricultural households consolidating land through lease contracts?
- How are farmers taking up agricultural technology, particularly equipment?
- How do agricultural households integrate livestock farming with crop cultivation?
- What does the monthly income of agricultural households look like?
- How diversified are the sources of income for agricultural families?
- How much income gets expended towards consumption expenditure by agricultural households, and how much surplus are they able to generate?
- How prevalent are distress events among agricultural households, and how do they deal with such events?
- Are agricultural households saving more since they are significantly more exposed to adverse events?
- Apart from savings, do agricultural households invest? What kind of investments are they undertaking?
- How do agricultural households borrow, and who do they borrow from?
- What is the prevalence of KCC among agricultural households?
- How amenable are agricultural households to formal insurance products?
- How do agricultural households engage with community-led groups like SHGs and JLGs?
- How are agricultural households engaging with collectives like Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs)?
- Are agricultural households open to change?
You can find the answers to the above questions here.
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[1] 56.7% are agricultural households, and 43.3% are non-agricultural households in the sample.
[2] Agricultural Household is defined as a household that received some value of produce more than ₹ 6500 from agricultural activities (e.g., cultivation of field crops, horticultural crops, fodder crops, plantation, animal husbandry, poultry, fishery, piggery, bee-keeping, vermiculture, sericulture, etc.) in the last one year and had at least one member who was self-employed in agriculture during the reference agricultural year (2021-22).
The first part of this blog is available here.
