Delhi Congress president Ajay Maken on Friday targeted the Kejriwal government over its highly-hyped Higher Education Credit Guarantee Scheme (student loan scheme) and claimed that it has proved to be a big fraud as even after eight months of the declaration of this loan scheme, not even a single student had availed of any loan.
Mr Maken said that while the Kejriwal government in national capital has spent several crore on advertisements to claim credit for the education loan scheme, in reality the scheme was fraught with unexplained traps that no student has come forward to avail of any loans.
“Under the new scheme, the Delhi government has fixed a unique condition wherein parents of loan-seeking students will have to jointly apply for a loan being sought by their wards as joint borrowers. Thus the liability on the parents would be more now from a ‘guarantor’ earlier to a ‘joint borrower.’ This has made the process of students’ loan extremely complex, as now students will have to ask their parents to pledge personal documents and securities in order to avail of simple educational loans,” added Mr Maken.
The Congress chief pointed out that an RTI query about how many students had applied for the scheme under the concerned department since the start of the scheme from June 11 had revealed the Directorate of Higher Education’s answer of “Nil.”
“Another question about the number of students who have received education loan under this scheme since its announcement till date, the reply again was “Nil.” On a query about the total budget for the said scheme, the reply was '30 crore (financial year 2015-2016). The Delhi government has already spent several crores just on the publicity of the said scheme. Such misleading propaganda and wastage of public resources in ads clearly reveals that self-publicity sans actual work is the agenda of this government, as sadly the scheme has not percolated down to the deserving students,” said Mr Maken.
