The fourth quarter of the fiscal just ended had seen a huge surge in credit flow which allowed banks to meet the credit growth projection set by the RBI. The major chunk of credit flow during this session was from the retail loan segment but the same time saw a distinct fall in credit to the commercial real estate sector owing to the provisioning norms last year.

The Marcoeconomic and Monetary Development Report of 2009-10 released by the RBI said that personal loans including education, home, consumer durable loans, among others contributed about 6.5% to non food credit as on February from -0.2 per cent in October of 2009.

Education loans booked an impressive growth of 30% while home loans grew by 8%.

"Disaggregated data on sectoral deployment of gross bank credit show improvement in credit growth to all major sectors such as agriculture, industry, services and personal loans from November 2009 onwards," RBI said.

RBI further said that the incremental credit posted in the last quarter of FY'2009-10 was highest in two years in absolute terms.

However, credit offtake in the real estate sector sawa massive downfall during the same period. RBI data reveals that credit growth in this sector has fallen to 0.9% in the year ended February 26, 2010 as compared to 58% during the same period last year.

A major cause for the same was the provisioning requirement for advances in this sector which was hiked to 1% from 0.4% in the second quarter monetary policy review last fiscal.

At a time when with the revival of credit demand, the private sector banks flourished again, but at the same time foreign bansk suffered a set back in their loan portfolio.