New Delhi: The NFDB on Thursday inked an MoU with PNB to help fish farmers get easy access to credit linkages for farming activates.
The credit assistance will be provided under the Fisheries & Aquaculture Infrastructure Development Fund (FIDF) Scheme and Prime Minister Matsya Sampada Yojana.
The FIDF, an interest subvention scheme, was created in 2018-19 with a corpus of over Rs 7000 crore which was to be raised by lending agencies such as NABARD, NCDC and all scheduled banks and disbursed among the beneficiaries. However, the scheme did not see much progress as it failed to get support from the banks despite directions from the Reserve Bank of India.
“Against this backdrop, the National Fisheries Development Board (NFDB) reached out to the bankers at the respective apex offices to sort out the issue and we received an enthusiastic response from Punjab National Bank (PNB),” said Dr Suvarna, Chief Executive of NFDB.
MD of PNB Mallikarjuna Rao, the Zonal Manager of Hyderabad and the rest of the PNB team pro-actively extended their hands of support to implement the FIDF, she added.
FIDF seeks to create and modernise the infrastructure in the aquaculture sector, reduce post-harvest losses and improve domestic marketing facilities, among others.