The possibility of closure of the special education loan given by the commercial banks, BoB, Druk PNB and BnB, has many people worried.
A few of the anxious people say their prospects of moving abroad to explore new opportunities will end if there is no loan to fund their education.
A graduate, Sangay, who dreams of going to Australia, said, “If the loan gets closed, it will be those who are not employed that will be impacted. We are planning to go outside because we don’t find employment opportunities that will sustain our livelihood, and with the banks reopening the loans, we have been planning to go. However, if the loan closes, it will be saddening.”
When the loan was first frozen by the central bank, most people aspiring to go abroad to study and work were left in panic.
Tshewang has plans to go to Australia, and he shared that the loans must be given at all times. “Education loan must be approved and given at all times. Owing to the already lengthy bureaucratic processes, the general public is met with constant disappointment. The government has failed miserably on creating employment, and the economy is declining, yet the taxes keep on rising. The only thing people can do is find opportunities elsewhere, so this education loan should not be stopped,” he said.
“There are only two possibilities with the loans, it will either close or it would not close. Last time, when I went to the bank to apply for the education loan, some officials said that they are already reaching the loan ceiling limit and might stop the applicants, and BNB had already closed off receiving applicants. On the other hand, it might not close because T-Bank had been giving the same loan for many years, so it might not close,” shared Dechen, a graduate who will be going to Australia in February 2023.
The loan ceiling limit is 10 percent for the secured and 5 percent for the unsecured on the banks loan portfolio. According to an Director of Operations from BNB, Hem Kumar Acharya, the bank stopped receiving the applicants to clear the backlogs. “We stopped receiving the applications for two days to clear the backlog of the already piled up applicants. Maybe that started the rumors, but we will not be closing the loans until there is a notification from the central bank asking us to close it.”
“Towards the year end, maybe from the 2nd or 3rd week of December, we will stop receiving the applicants because we have other things to sort. However, we will start receiving from the month of January. We won’t be closing the loans, and we still haven’t reached the limit. Occasionally, we might have to stop to process the pending applications but there will be no closure,” he added.
So far, approximately 1,700 people have applied for the loans from the three commercial banks with about 1,100 loans being processed and released.
The education loan is temporarily stopped when the loan reaches its limit, but will reopen when the people close off their loans, as it is a rolling type of loan.