Today, the Reserve Bank released its web publication entitled ‘Quarterly Basic Statistical Returns (BSR)-1: Outstanding Credit of Scheduled Commercial Banks (SCBs)¹ - December 2024²’ on its ‘Database on Indian Economy’ portal (https://data.rbi.org.in Homepage > Publications). It captures various characteristics of bank credit such as occupation/activity and organisational sector of the borrower, type of account and interest rates based on account-level reporting³. Data reported by SCBs {excluding Regional Rural Banks (RRBs)} are presented for bank groups, population groups⁴ and states.

Highlights:

• Bank credit growth (y-o-y) decelerated to 11.8 per cent in December 2024 from 12.6 per cent in September 2024; all population groups (viz., rural, semi-urban, urban and metropolitan branches of banks) maintained double digit growth, though with some moderation, which was experienced by both public sector and private sector banks.

• Personal loans, which have large share (31.5 per cent) in total credit, recorded moderation in annual growth to 13.7 per cent (15.2 per cent a quarter ago); credit to agriculture and industry sectors also recorded some tempering in the growth.

• Bank lending for trade, finance and professional/ other services accelerated during Q3:2024-25.

• Lending to public sector organisations accelerated to 5.4 per cent in December 2024 as compared with 0.3 per cent in the previous quarter; its share in total credit stood at 13.6 per cent.

• Nearly two per cent of the bank loans were in terms of bills purchased/ discounted.

• Bank charged 8 per cent to less than 10 per cent interest rate on over half of the loan amount and nearly 16 per cent of the loans were bearing less than 8 per cent interest rate; the remaining loans were bearing 10 per cent or above interest rate.

Ajit Prasad          
Deputy General Manager
(Communications)    

Press Release: 2024-2025/2227

¹ Banking aggregates based on fortnightly Form-A Return (collected under Section 42(2) of the RBI Act, 1934) for the last reporting Friday of December 2024 were published earlier at our website (Home>Statistics>Data Release>Fortnightly>Scheduled Bank's Statement of Position in India) and aggregate level monthly data on sectoral deployment of bank credit for December 2024, reported by select major banks, were also released on the website (Home>Statistics>Data Releases>Monthly> Data on Sectoral Deployment of Bank Credit).

² Reference date for BSR-1 is last day of the quarter. The figures used for comparison pertaining to previous rounds include the impact of merger of a non-bank with a bank with effect from July 1, 2023.

³ Previous data release in the series, covering end-September 2024 position, was published on November 26, 2024, on RBI website.

⁴ Population group criteria used for BSR is based on population size of respective revenue centre, as per census 2011, where branches of SCBs are operating and classified as: a) 'Rural' (population less than 10,000), b) 'Semi-urban' (population of 10,000 to less than 1 lakh), c) 'Urban' (population of 1 lakh to less than 10 lakhs), d) 'Metropolitan' (population of 10 lakhs and above).