Non-food credit growth accelerates to 8% in February: RBI data

The non-food credit growth has accelerated to 8 per cent in February as against 6.6 per cent in the year-ago period, the Reserve Bank said on Thursday. For the current fiscal year till February 25, the non-food credit growth has accelerated to 6.2 per cent against 3.7 per cent for the same period of the last year.

Credit growth to industry accelerated to 6.5 per cent in February 2022 from 1 per cent in February last year, which included growth acceleration to 71.4 per cent growth in the medium enterprises segment as against 30.6 per cent in the year-ago period. However, demand from large corporates continued to be sluggish with a growth of 0.5 per cent in February 2022, as against a de-growth of 0.6 per cent in the year-ago period. There have been concerns about the lack of capital investments due to lower capacity utilisation and large corporates have opted to de-leverage with the easy liquidity conditions.

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In the services sector, the overall credit growth slowed down to 5.6 per cent in February 2022 as against 8.8 per cent in the year-ago period. Shipping registered an 11.1 per cent de-growth as against a growth of 30 per cent in the year-ago period, the aviation industry reported a 12.9 per cent versus 35.1 per cent growth. Demand for credit from the financial services firms also seemed to be strong with overall NBFCs showing a 14.6 per cent growth which included housing finance companies (22.8 per cent) and public finance institutions (47.6 per cent), central bank data said.

The central bank said credit to agriculture and allied activities continued to perform well, registering a growth of 10.4 per cent in the month as compared to 8.6 per cent in February 2021. On the retail side, the overall personal loans segment showed a 12.3 per cent increase in growth as against 9.6 per cent in the year-ago period, which included the demand for consumer durable continuing to be strong.

Gold loan growth came down to 26.2 per cent against 75.9 per cent in February 2021, while the education segment continued to show a de-growth of 2.2 per cent probably driven by foreign travel being affected. Meanwhile, data on scheduled commercial banks' outstanding credit till December showed a rise at 8.1 per cent for the October-December period, making it the third consecutive quarter of rising.

Private sector lenders led with a 13.4 per cent growth and accounted for 43 per cent of the incremental loans, the RBI said. After contracting for six successive quarters, annual growth in bank credit to the industrial sector turned positive in December 2021; the personal loan segment continued to grow at a robust pace and its share in total credit increased to 27.6 per cent from 25.6 per cent a year ago, the data showed.

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