HRD minister Kapil Sibal and Planning Commission deputy chairperson Montek Singh were involved in a public spat over the model to ensure every student gets a loan for pursuing higher education.
HRD minister Kapil Sibal and Planning Commission deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia have been involved in a public spat over the model to ensure that every student gets loans for pursuing higher education.
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Sibal wanted the government to ensure that financial institutions granted loans, a view that was rejected by Ahluwalia. They were present at the launch of a report on corporate sector participation in higher education by Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy.
On Tuesday, the squabble started with Sibal saying that education reforms cannot be pursued without government funding. He expressed his annoyance with the Planning Commission for rejecting the HRD ministry’s proposal for setting up a Student Loan Finance Corporation.
“One should ask the Planning Commission why our proposal for the finance corporation was rejected?” he asked in a pointed question to Ahluwalia in the packed house. “Some loans have to be guaranteed by the government, or no financial institution will grant money for student upliftment,” Sibal said.
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Many banks, including those from the public sector, have imposed stringent conditions on awarding student loans. “Bright students from a poor background are the worst sufferers,” an official said.
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Many banks, including those from the public sector, have imposed stringent conditions on awarding student loans. “Bright students from a poor background are the worst sufferers,” an official said.
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Ahluwalia hit back minutes later by saying that budgeted support for education loans is a “bad idea”. The noted economist made it clear that the education loan scheme has to be based on payback methodology, depending on the job the loanee gets.
“If a student gets a government job, half of the loan amount can be waived off, but if he or she gets employed in the lucrative private sector, the entire loan should be repaid,” he told HT.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
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