To address their various concerns, banks are not only trying to ensure smooth flow of credit to them but also opening centres to redress their grievances, a special meeting of State-Level Bankers’ Committee of Haryana said here today.

Stating that against the target date of March 2010 of doubling credit flow to MSEs, banks in Haryana have achieved the target by September last year and credit growth to MSEs in Haryana registered a growth of 43 per cent in the period of one year, from September 2007 to September 2008.

Public sector banks will also grant need based ad hoc working capital demand loans up to 20 per cent of the existing fund based limits in respect of units having overall fund based credit facility up to Rs 10 crore. The loan will be repayable in one year with a provision of moratorium of six months during which only interest will have to be serviced. Also, for units unable to repay term loan obligation on time, repayment will be rescheduled/re-phased on a case-to-case basis within the overall loan policy of the respective banks. Finance for purchase of gensets will be made available on soft terms and banks will take up a second restructuring of SME accounts on a case-to-case basis, said Chairman and Managing Director of Punjab National Bank (PNB), Dr KC Chakrabarty.

However, the entrepreneurs in Haryana have been concentrating on already developed industries and are not diversifying into sunshine sectors such as food processing, which has a lot of scope, he said. “This has resulted into creation of excess capacities in already developed industries while potential in emerging industries remains untapped,” he added.

Lending to automobile cluster goes down