Patna: Deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi on Friday asked banks to play a proactive role in the state's development by increasing the flow of institutional finance in different sectors.

He raised this point during the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development's (Nabard) state credit seminar where it released the state focus paper. According to the paper, Bihar has the potential of credit flow of 1.22 lakh crore in 2018-19.

It also provided the sector-wise financial projection of credit, covering things like crop production and marketing, term loan for agriculture and allied activities, agriculture infrastructure, micro, small and medium industries, education, housing and renewable energy among others.

Nabard chief general manager S.K. Mazumdar, representatives of different banks, including Reserve Bank of India and senior government officials like agriculture produce commissioner Sunil Kumar Singh, were present at the event.

Addressing the participants, Sushil underlined the need to promote diverse activities by farmers to enhance their income and maintained that without diversification, the goal of doubling their income by 2022 would not be realised.

He then pointed out that how the banks were not paying adequate attention to credit flow for dairy, fisheries and animal husbandry sector and only about 10 to 15 per cent of the target of loan flow was taking place in these sectors.

Sushil, who also heads the finance department, informed the participants that the state government was planning to set a target of disbursement of Rs 70,000 crore credit flow in 2018-19 and banks would be briefed about it during the state-level bankers' committee meet scheduled to be held on February 9.

Sushil asked the Nabard representatives to come up with more suggestions that what more could be done for growth of the state in the light of the Union budget.

There was a brief presentation on the various works being done for the development of agriculture and allied sectors as well as infrastructure development and a special presentation was made on the success stories of farmers' producer organisations.

Case studies of such farmer producer organisations from Darbhanga, Samastipur and Patna districts were also outlined in the programme.

Towards the end of the programme, Sushil awarded the good performing FPOs and also representatives of the water resources, road construction and finance departments were given certificates of appreciation for doing good work in implementing projects with rural infrastructure development fund provided by Nabard.