Today, the Reserve Bank released the web publication ‘Basic Statistical Return on Credit by Scheduled Commercial Banks (SCBs) in India – March 2020’¹ on its Database on Indian Economy (DBIE) portal (web-link: https://dbie.rbi.org.in/DBIE/dbie.rbi?site=publications#!19). The publication provides information on various characteristics of bank credit, based on data submitted by SCBs (including Regional Rural Banks) under the annual Basic Statistical Return (BSR)-1 system, which collects information on type of account, organisation, occupation/activity and category of the borrower, district and population group of the place of utilisation of credit, rate of interest, credit limit and amount outstanding².

Main Findings:

• Personal loans continued to record robust growth: their share in total credit has gradually increased to 24.0 per cent in March 2020 from 16.6 per cent five years ago.

• Credit to the industrial sector moderated further and its share in total credit declined to 30.6 per cent in March 2020 from 41.2 per cent in March 2015.

• All bank groups recorded moderation in credit growth during 2019-20 though private sector banks continued to lead the growth.

• With consistently high growth in retail lending, the share of household sector [which includes individuals, Hindu undivided family (HUF), proprietary and partnership firms, among others] in total credit increased substantially to 51.0 per cent in March 2020 from 41.8 per cent in March 2015.

• Among individuals, female borrowers held 34.2 per cent of the loan accounts in March 2020 as compared with their 21.1 per cent share five years ago; the share of female borrowers in total loan amount also increased to 22.0 per cent from 17.9 per cent over this period.

• The number of credit accounts with SCBs increased by 17.3 per cent (Y-o-Y) during 2019-20 and stood at 27.25 crore accounts in March 2020 reflecting increased penetration of bank lending.

• Though less than one-fifth of the branches of SCBs were in the metropolitan areas, they accounted for 63.5 per cent of sanctioned credit and 59.3 per cent of credit utilisation.

• Among states, credit utilisation was the highest in Maharashtra (23.9 per cent), followed by national capital territory (NCT) of Delhi (13.0 per cent) and Tamil Nadu (9.3 per cent).

Ajit Prasad
Director   

Press Release: 2020-2021/588

¹ The current publication includes data on credit; the detailed data on various dimensions of deposits in March 2020 were released earlier on October 14, 2020 (Path: Home>Statistics>Data Release>Annual> Basic Statistical Return (BSR)2 – Deposits with Scheduled Commercial Banks (SCBs)). The credit aggregates from the quarterly BSR-1 for SCBs (other than RRBs) are released on the RBI website separately since December 2014.

² Banking aggregates based on the fortnightly Form-A Return (collected under Section 42(2) of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934) for the last reporting Friday of March 2020 were published earlier at our website (Path: Home>Statistics>Data Release>Fortnightly>Scheduled Bank's Statement of Position in India) and disaggregated statistics on deposits and credit of SCBs for March 31, 2020 were also released earlier (Path: Home>Statistics>Data Release>Quarterly> Quarterly Statistics on Deposits and Credit of SCBs).