RBI Guideline On Time-Limit Hurts Gold Loan Takers
Bankers used to have a soft corner towards gold loan debtors. If they paid interest, the loan could be rescheduled or they could even be given a fresh loan and close the previous loan.
KAKINADA: Those who took gold loans for purposes like marriage, agriculture activities etc are in trouble as it will not be possible for bankers to reschedule their loans. RBI's revised rule insists that the loan-takers clear their debt within a year.
Bankers used to have a soft corner towards gold loan debtors. If they paid interest, the loan could be rescheduled or they could even be given a fresh loan and close the previous loan. But in August last year, RBI issued guidelines that there shall not be a rescheduling of gold loans.
When the one-year term is completed, the debtor should clear the debt with principal and interest. If he wants to get a gold loan again, there should be a gap of one or two days, after which bankers can sanction the loans.
If the banker find that the CIBIL score of the debtor, after clearing the gold loan, is not satisfactory, some bankers refuse to sanction a loan and some bankers are giving gold loans with lesser amount than the prescribed gold rate.
Farmers and tenant farmers are majorly victims in the new guidelines for gold loan. “My relative took a gold loan of Rs2 lakh four years ago. He used to pay the interest every year and the banker rescheduled the loan. Sometimes I have cleared the loan and got it again. But, now the bankers are exerting pressure on me to clear the total loan,” one tenant farmer said.
He said,”I took an additional three acres of land for lease and invested the money on it. I begged the bankers to take interest first and reschedule my loan. But they citied the new RBI guidelines and said they can’t do anything’’ said YL Prasad, a tenant farmer of Kovvur village.
The tenant farmer said that previously, when the farmers applied for agriculture loans, the interest used to be less than that of non-agriculture loans. But now the bankers are collecting the same interest for agriculture and non-agriculture loans.
He urged the central government, in particular finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, to change the contentious RBI guidelines and also reduce the interest rates for the agriculture sector.
The central government is giving more incentives to MSMEs, but there are no such incentives to tenant farmers, he noted.
A banker said, “According to the RBI guidelines, the debtor should clear the total debt under the gold loan within a year. Though he paid interest, his loan account will become NPA within three months and his CIBIL score will fall immediately after the completion of one year.”
He said the bankers can’t do justice to the gold loan debtors as it is a ‘mortgage loan’, in addition to the strict RBI guidelines.
