When earlier this year a team of banking officials turned up at her doorstep at Puthenvelikkara near North Paravur for initiating measures for attaching her small three-room house on a mere four cent-plot, Sulochana Ashokan literally lost it.
As the officials got down to measuring her land, the 56-year-old seethed in rage as she asked them to measure her paralysed husband confined to bed and to attach him as well. Facing the prospect of losing her home 16 years after taking a loan of Rs. 60,000 and having repaid Rs. 40,000 was something she could hardly comprehend.
The repayment got hit when eight years after taking the loan for meeting the expenses of marrying off her daughter, her husband got paralysed and she herself was put out of her job as a domestic help on developing liver ailment.
Some 35 kilometres away at Irumpanam near the temple town of Tripunithura, another tin-sheeted house measuring less than 500 sq.ft. remains locked. The house-owner T.K. Surendran, a 60-year-old former headload worker, travels daily from his rented home in the city, where he takes care of his widowed daughter, to clean up the premises. Having a taken a loan of Rs. 5 lakh in 2015, he claims to have repaid more than half of it but is still staring at the prospect of his house being attached.
“I am trying to clear the debts by selling the land. But knowing my desperation, prospective buyers are deliberately undervaluing it,” rues Surendran.
Not so far away at Athani near the IT hub of Kakkanad, 11 members of three different families cramped into a four-room house with unplastered walls are also on the verge of being evicted for defaulting on a loan of Rs. 2 lakh taken way back in 2009. Recently, the bank stuck notices of the imminent attachment not just on the house door but along the wall of the entire pavement leading up to it.
All these affected families are Dalits and so are the majority of over 100 families who are facing similar prospects as per a list drawn by the Anti-SARFAESI (Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest) People’s Movement. An indefinite stir launched by the movement in Ernakulam district fighting the victimisation of loanees, predominantly those belonging to the poor and marginalised sections, by banks invoking the SARFAESI Act is now into the fifth month. Many of these affected families took loans from various branches of the Kerala State Cooperative Bank, branded as Kerala Bank.
“The Dalits and the marginalised who have taken small loans and have repaid as much they could are being made easy targets by banks, while big defaulters are left free. This victimisation is being done despite banks having the provision to write off small loans using their risk fund,” alleged P.K. Vijayan, district chairperson of the Anti-SARFAESI People’s Movement.
Minister for Cooperation V.N. Vasavan, however, said that with all 700-odd branches of Kerala Bank now being regulated by the Reserve Bank of India, there is little room for manoeuvring by the State Government to protect even the marginalised sections against the invocation of the SARFAESI Act. “RBI prioritises repayment of loan by debtors,” he said.
