According to senior bankers who have attended the meetings, the RBI wants banks to categorise corporates into four groups: Borrowers accessing bank loans for productive purposes, borrowers accessing bank loans to build up inventories, borrowers not accessing bank loans because they are raising debt through other instruments like commercial papers and debentures and borrowers who have not at all taken bank loans.

RBI deputy governor YV Reddy has been discussing the issue threadbare at a series of meetings with senior bankers as a run-up to the credit policy. The exercise, christened resource-management meetings, was kicked off early this month.

Marking a departure from the convention, this time the RBI brass has called only the executives of major public sector banks forresource-management meetings. Traditionally, all bank managements have been called for the annual exercise which was till recently known as credit-budget meeting.

"The original plan was that two RBI deputy governors -- YV Reddy and SP Talwar -- would hold simultaneous meetings on resource management as well as the performance analysis of public sector banks as a run-up to the signing of MoUs with the RBI. However, that has not worked out," sources in the RBI said.

The tardy credit offtake seems to be the major concern of the central bank at the moment. Apart from the sluggish growth in vanilla credit, banks' funds flow to the commercial sector through CPs and NCDs has substantially come down in the first half of the current fiscal.

Triggered by a Rs 4,312-crore credit growth in the last fortnight of September, bank credit has grown by Rs 4,053 crore (1.3 per cent) in April-September this year. However, bank credit to the industry has grown by a paltry Rs 459 crore while food credit grew by Rs 3,594crore. The year-on-year growth in bank credit stood at Rs 17.3 per cent (Rs 48,396 crore).

This is against a year-on-year growth of 21.5 per cent (Rs 1,17,458 crore) in aggregate deposits. Aggregate deposits during the first half of 1998-99 grew by 9.7 per cent (Rs 58,596 crore) against an 8.1 per cent (Rs 40,949 crore) during the first half of 1997-98.

"Despite the completion of about 70 per cent of the centre's annual borrowing programme within the first half of the current fiscal, there is enough liquidity in the system. As of now, there is no visible sign of credit picking up," a public sector bank chief said.