The Bangladesh Bank board on Wednesday decided to give Tk 800 crore loan to state-owned Bangladesh Krishi Bank and Rajshahi Krishi Unnayan Bank for credit disbursement in agriculture sector.
The BB board at a meeting took the decision to give Tk 500 crore to BKB and Tk 300 crore to RAKUB with five per cent interest rate against a government guarantee.The banks will give agriculture loan at up to 13 per cent interest rate to their clients.
The tenure of the refinance fund is one-year, said a BB official.
The BB board, however, did not grant another refinance fund for the country’s Islamic banks, he said.
Another BB official said that BKB and RAKUB had earlier applied to the central bank for the refinance fund against their disbursed loans in the agriculture sector.
He said that the Islamic banks had also applied to take loan from the central bank’s refinance fund in a bid to disburse credit in the agro-based industrial sector.
The Islamic banks requested the BB to create a separate profit-oriented refinance fund as they could not take the credit from the existing interest-based refinance funds, he said.
Under the circumstances, the SME & Special Programmes Department of the BB proposed that the central bank’s board create a separate profit-oriented refinance fund with initial amount of Tk 50 crore, he said.
The BB board asked the department to verify more about the refinance fund for Islamic banks before taking decision in this regard, he said.
-With New Age input
