Zarai Tarqiati Bank Ltd (ZTBL) has disbursed agricultural loans of Rs 48 billion up to August 2008, against Rs 37 billion disbursed during the same period of last corresponding year. It was announced by ZTBL President Muhammad Zaka Khan Ashraf while addressing the 5th Zonal Chiefs' Conference held here on Friday.
Chief Financial Officer Abdul Ghaffar Bhatti, SEVP (Operation) Muhammad Nadeem Chohan, SEVP (Recovery and SAM) Muhammad Tasneem and Zonal Chiefs of ZTBL also participated in the conference. Ashraf said that ill-planned policies of the previous years have resulted in overall reduction in the agricultural yields.
He said in the light of President of Pakistan's vision for agricultural development and alleviation of poverty, ZTBL must focus on increased and diversified lending for development purposes. "The government has taken initiatives to protect the farmer's losses through crop loan insurance of five major crops," he maintained.
"We have not only food shortage and surging price challenges but also water conservation, lack of silos type godowns, farm mechanisation and automation of bank's operations," he said. To address all these issues ZTBL has a pivotal role to play in order to fulfil the government initiatives for agricultural uplift, he added.
ZTBL President said that we must focus on the use of innovative technologies to increase our per acre productivity, which is far less than even a middle level agricultural country. He added that there is dire need to shift our traditional farming practices to modern farming techniques to overcome the food crises in times to come.
Ashraf said we must realise that a significant portion of our foreign exchange is spent on food import bill. "The government is very much concerned to save much needed foreign exchange and desires increase in yield production to export the surplus production," he added.
He said the ZTBL has a specialised manpower, which can mobilise its human resource base more effectively. However, he added that a new impetus is required for the achievement of bank's vital targets like recovery, particularly of SAM loans, Lending and Deposits, which would bring financial sustainability and would change the fate of the bank. ZTBL President urged of all the zones to ensure smooth operation of online centralised FOCS and DMS, which are new initiatives being implemented for easy and prompt access to data as it would ensure transparency and good governance.
Other participants of the conference said that on deposit side, the bank launched different schemes and fetched Rs 4 billion. The tractor financing also increased substantially from 6,000 to 11,000 tractors while tube-wells financing increased from 700 to 1,400 tube-wells. The bank also achieved another landmark of serving 400,000 borrowers against 289,000 in the corresponding period last year.
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