Chennai: The Madras high court pointed out that the purpose of education loan scheme itself is only to attract and develop the pattern for pursuing the higher education, besides strengthening the status of financially oppressed people by providing financial assistance for higher education. The court also acted on that comment in coming to the rescue of a student from a poor family and aspir-ing to study MBBS course. IOB, Salem was directed to accept agricultural property as collateral security offered by the student and grant him an educational loan within 4 weeks.
Disposing of a petition from student S.Sampathkumar, Justice Pushpa Sathyanarayana, who gave the directive, said, “When there are lots of philanthropic and welfare schemes are offered even by the banks, these kinds of special cases may be considered by them leniently and encourage the student community to pursue their goals”.
The case of the petitioner was that he secured about 95.75 percent in the higher secondary examination and also got admission to Terna Medical college, run by Terna Public Charitable Trust at Nerul, Navi Mumbai. The admission to MBBS course was purely on merit and based on the marks obtained by the students in the entrance test. The petitioner, from a remote village, has got the rare opportunity to study MBBS and he was very hopeful in pursuing the same by applying for an education loan. Accordingly, he applied for the loan with IOB, Salem by offering the agricultural property owned by the family as collateral security. It was, however, rejected by the bank on the ground that agricultural property cannot be taken as collateral security. Aggrieved, he filed the present petition.
The judge said the petitioner has obtained information through RTI wherein the bank has stated that there was no restriction for considering agricultural property as collateral security for granting educational loan. As the loan was being taken for pursuing the medical course, the bank should have extended the help to the petitioner, especially when there was no embargo for granting education loan against the agricultural property as collateral security.
