Several have written to the PMO seeking its help in getting funding for their education or in facilitating bank loans.
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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