DNA:
New Delhi: Thursday, 24 September 2015.
The son of a
contract labourer in Tamil Nadu, G Pandi, 20, had almost given up on his dream
of becoming a nurse till he found an unlikely guardian angel in the form of
the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) in faraway Delhi that intervened to ensure
that he got the education loan he wanted. It has been a journey from the depths
of disappointment to hope for the young man. With his father barely managing to
make Rs.3,000-4,000 per month as a labourer in Dindigul, Pandi was determined
to pull his family of five out of its daily struggle for survival. He applied
for an education loan from the State Bank of India after completing his
schooling. But with no guarantor available, the bank shut its doors on him.
"A friend of mine then suggested that I write to the prime minister. I
wrote to him in April informing him that the bank? had refused to fund my
education," Pandi told dna over the phone from Tamil Nadu.?Two months
later, he got a call from the bank approving his loan. He is now in his first
year at the P Nagalakshmi College in Tamil Nadu.
Pandi isn't
the only one. Several others like him have written to the PMO seeking its help
in getting funding for their education or in facilitating bank loans. A reply
in response to an RTI filed by dna reveals that the PMO has received about 40
such letters since January. These letters are then forwarded to the human
resource development (HRD) ministry which then coordinates the requests with
the stakeholders concerned. "Each file is scrutinised. In case the
education can be funded under any of the scholarship programmes of the HRD, we
try to facilitate that. In case a bank is involved, we write to the banks to
fund students? of economic weaker sections under central schemes to provide
interest ?subsidy," said a ministry official. The entire process takes about
three to four months. NR Raghunathan from Bangalore was amongst those who got
help too.
Raghunathan,
who holds a small time private job, needed Rs 20 lakh to send his daughter to
the US. Like Pandi, banks had shown him the door too. He then sought help from
the PMO. "The prime minister's office took time to ?respond. In the
meanwhile, I had to arrange funds from my friends and family," said
Raghunathan, whose daughter is studying Entertainment Management at Pittsburgh.
Raghunathan got a call from the Central Bank of India last month approving his
loan. "We have managed to pay the fees for the first year. With loan now
being approved, we will be able to sail through comfortably in the next
year," he said. Not all are as lucky, however Argha Pritam
Choudhary was seeking financial assistance for an MBBS programme at Tripura and
managed to get a loan from the Union Bank of India but it's not enough.
"There are ?several overhead expenditures that I cannot meet. I had
requested the ?PMO to provide financial assistance to meet these
overheads," he said.?? But since there is no policy of the government to
fund these ?overheads, Choudhary's request could not entertained. "I even
wrote a? mail to the HRD ministry but have not got any response."
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