Assertion (A) : In the agricultural lending mechanism of India, moneylenders despite their usurious…

A period government answer to Parliament (26 March 2012) reports banks as the leading source of outstanding farmer-household loans, 36%, versus moneylenders 26%, based on NSS 2003. Thus moneylenders remained important but were not predominant nationally. The separate 18% agricultural-credit subtarget was repeatedly missed: the parliamentary response states the subtarget and supplies bank-wise returns; the RBI historical retrospective verifies repeated shortfalls. A is false and R true: D. Official A disagrees and is preserved as a disagreement, not used to override the evidence. Historical evidence: Rajya Sabha, unstarred question 1120, Conditions of Farmers: Printed pp.335-336, original indexed text. Original government text indexed by search explicitly ranks banks 36% first and moneylenders 26% second; present direct URL redirects to a modern catalogue. Rajya Sabha, unstarred question 2994, agricultural loan regulations and bank-wise targets: Printed pp.92-97, original indexed parliamentary response. Search-indexed original response states the 18% subtarget and shortfall mechanism; the current download redirects to a modern catalogue, so its attached table was not inspected. S. S. Mundra, Research imperatives for the Indian banking sector, RBI Deputy Governor speech: Paragraph 15. RBI reports agricultural 18% subtarget missed in all but three years during 2001-2014; historical cross-check, not a 2013 publication.