Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Deputy Governor K C Chakrabarty on Tuesday said agricultural productivity could be determined in terms of bank credit facility alone. Granular data was needed on non-credit support like technology, marketing and improving the quality of inputs in order to link agricultural credit with productivity, he said.
“The data available at our level is only that on the total agriculture lending—direct or indirect—and the number of accounts. Beyond that, there is no disaggregated data,” Chakrabarty said, adding it would not be difficult for banks to cover ground-level data, as most of them had now moved on to core banking solutions. “If you are monitoring productivity in agriculture, you cannot look only at credit, you also need to look at the non-monetary support given to the sector, and this is not happening at any level,” he said. Even the reliability of data provided by bankers was questionable. “Half of it is disbursement data and the other half is outstanding data. For every industry, we take the outstanding data, so why not in agriculture as well,” he asked. According to the bank's data, agriculture credit in rural and semi-urban areas was declining, while agri-lending in metropolitan areas was rising. “I don't know what agri-lending they are doing in metropolitan areas,” he said.
According to RBI data, bank lending to agriculture and allied activities rose 12.8 per cent annually in June, compared with 22 per cent a year ago.