Consider the following events and arrange them in chronological order : 1) Establishment of NABARD 2) Self Help Group Bank Linkage Programme 3) Kisan Credit Card Plan 4) Establishment of Regional Rural Bank Select the correct answer from the codes given below.

The correct answer is A. The chronological order is Regional Rural Banks (1975), NABARD (1982), the SHG-Bank Linkage Programme (1992), and the Kisan Credit Card scheme (1998).

• Regional Rural Banks (1975): Set up under the Regional Rural Banks Ordinance of 1975, later given statutory backing by the RRB Act, 1976, to fill the gap in rural credit left by commercial banks and cooperatives.
• NABARD (1982): Established on 12 July 1982 through the NABARD Act, 1981, as the apex development bank for agriculture and rural credit, taking over the refinancing role of RBI and the agricultural credit functions of the RBI.
• SHG-Bank Linkage (1992): NABARD's pilot began in 1992 with RBI's approval, linking savings-led self help groups with banks. It is the backbone of the financial inclusion story.
• Kisan Credit Card (1998): Introduced in 1998 to give farmers timely short-term credit in a single document. It was a later innovation built on the institutions already in place.

Options B, C and D fail because they misplace NABARD or the KCC. Option C places NABARD before the RRBs, which is wrong. Options B and D push NABARD to the end, after the 1992 SHG programme, and D also places KCC before the SHG programme. For Mains, the sequence shows how the rural credit architecture was built step by step, from institutions to linkage models to farmer products.

Trap: Candidates often remember NABARD as a 1990s body or confuse the KCC date with the SHG linkage date, and so arrange the events wrongly.