Dalits dominate list of borrowers facing property attachment threat under SARFAESI Act
The Hindu
‘The marginalised who have taken small loans and repaid as much they could are being made easy targets by banks while big defaulters are left free,’ says Anti-Sarfaesi official
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.
“We are judges and therefore, cannot act like Mughals of a bygone era ... the writ courts in the guise of doing justice cannot transcend the barriers of law,” the High Court of Karnataka observed while setting aside an order of a single judge, who in 2016 had extended the lease of a public premises allotted to a physically challenged person to 20 years contrary to 12-year period stipulated in the law.
The High Court of Karnataka on Monday declined to interfere, at present, in the investigation against a Bharatiya Janata Party worker, who is among the accused persons facing charges of circulating obscene clips, related to “morphed” images and videos clips related to Prajwal Revanna, former Hassan MP, in public domain through pen drives and other modes.
The 16th edition of Bhoomi Habba was held on June 8, at the Visthar campus. The festival drew a vibrant crowd who came together to celebrate eco-consciousness through a variety of engaging activities, creative workshops, panel discussions, interactive exhibits and performances, all centered around this year’s theme: “Save Water, Save Lives.”