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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Probe for loan torment -Jaideep Hardikar

Probe for loan torment -Jaideep Hardikar

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published Published on Dec 18, 2016   modified Modified on Dec 18, 2016
-The Telegraph

Nagpur: A special investigation team will probe the alleged harassment of poor women borrowers in Maharashtra by loan recovery agents of micro-finance institutions, the state government announced today after month-long street protests and an Assembly debate.

Junior home minister Deepak Kesarkar assured an agitated Assembly that the state was considering a law similar to one Andhra Pradesh had enacted in 2011 to regulate the MFIs' lending and loan recovery practices.

About 1,000 women had marched to the Assembly here yesterday to protest the recovery agents' alleged tactics of insulting or beating defaulters in front of their families and neighbours and confiscating their belongings.

Poor women from villages and urban slums, mostly members of self-help groups, are known to take loans from multiple MFIs, lured by their easy availability, to meet household needs or start micro-enterprises. But the high interest rates, between 20 and 50 per cent, means they struggle to repay the loans.

Rupa Kulkarni, the head of a domestic workers' association in Vidarbha, told The Telegraph a fortnight ago that loans from registered and non-registered micro-lenders had caused a "crisis" among her organisation's members.

A similar debt crisis, and harassment by loan recovery agents, had led to 75 suicides six years ago in the then united Andhra Pradesh, prompting the Centre and the Reserve Bank to impose regulations on MFIs.

Andhra itself passed a law banning MFIs from approaching customers' homes, lengthening the repayment cycle from one week to one month, and making government approval mandatory before a second loan could be advanced to the same borrower.

However, the Micro-Finance Institutions Network (MFIN), an industry lobby, earlier this week blamed some external factors too for what it said was a plunge in loan repayments in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

One of these, it said, was a rumour about the government waiving all micro-finance loans that led to the women stopping repayments.

For a week this month, hundreds of women borrowers had queued outside the Nagpur collector's office to fill in a non-existent "waiver form".

MFIN executives have met the Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh chief ministers to complain that some local political workers were advising the women not to repay their loans.

The Aam Aadmi Party had been the first to mobilise the women's protests before the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress too jumped in. Hundreds of women have demonstrated in Wardha, Solapur, Amravati, Nagpur and parts of Marathwada.

The stress of repayment deepened after the November 8 demonetisation, which hit the earnings of the poor, particularly the construction labourers.

According to MFIN data, MFIs disbursed Rs 2,024 crore in loans in Maharashtra - 11 per cent of the national figure - between April and June. The figure for Madhya Pradesh was Rs 1,225 crore.

The Telegraph, 17 December, 2016, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1161218/jsp/nation/story_125417.jsp#.WFacvrmdeyA


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