Punjab Government on Wednesday unveiled the State focus paper prepared by NABARD projecting a credit plan of Rs1,74,264 crore.
Jaspal Singh, Secretary, Expenditure, Punjab Government complimented NABARD (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development) for making a very detailed presentation supported by facts and figures, in the State credit seminar held here.
The document unveiled reflects the finesse with which planning is done from district to the State level. He mentioned that gone are the days when credit off take was poor with banks increasingly adopting a flexible approach in the past couple of years. This has encouraged NABARD to make a projection of a whopping Rs1.74 lakh crore for 2016-17.
He urged the bankers to give adequate attention to the secondary and tertiary sectors as agriculture faces some grave challenges like depletion of groundwater, soil erosion and its deteriorating quality. This calls for working on our priorities and urged the stakeholders to work in this direction.
Singh indicated that the availability of machinery was quite high and with low utilisation, returns were not optimum. On the need for diversification, he referred to the recent spurt in prices of agriculture commodities, especially pulses, and wondered whether we are adequately prepared to tap these opportunities.
Rupay KCC Card by the Cooperative Bank was also launched on the occasion — a first in the country and some farmers from SAS Nagar (Mohali) were handed over the cards.
Dr PM Ghole, Chief General Manager, who heads the Punjab Regional Office of NABARD, while presenting the highlights of the State Focus Paper for 2016-17, mentioned that in line with the objective of sustaining 4% agriculture growth during the 12th FYP, the theme of this year’s state focus paper too is “Accelerating the pace of capital formation in agriculture and allied activities”.
NABARD has projected a credit flow of Rs174264 crore during 2016-17 in the State of Punjab under the revised Priority Sector lending norms outlined by the Reserve Bank of India. This represents an overall growth of 23.34% over the projections for 2015-16. Of the aggregate credit plan of Rs174264 crore for 2016-17, the share of Crop loan is pegged at about 45% (Rs78086 crore), Agriculture Term loan at Rs16995 crore (9.75%) and MSME at Rs27758 crore (15.92%), Agriculture Infrastructure at Rs4415 crore (2.53%) and Agriculture Ancillary activities at Rs10278 crore (5.90%). Under Agriculture Term loan, projections have been made for thrust areas like minor irrigation, dairy development, soil and water management including micro irrigation, farm mechanization, plantation and horticulture, food processing, storage and market yards, etc, he said.
In line with the revised Priority Sector guidelines of RBI, for the first time, credit potential had been estimated under sub sectors like Export Credit and Social Infrastructure besides exclusive projection under Educational loan, Housing loan, SHGs/JlGs, etc.