BY MADHU AGRAWAL
Food, clothing and shelter are basic needs of any human being. But this phenomenon is now-a-days not followed by banks initiating hard and inhuman recovery processes by banks even in on-going disastrous unprecedented corona-pandemic now initiated including under Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest (SARFAESI) Act, 2002 especially after a Supreme Court order of March 2021 lifting stay on banks declaring Non-Performing-Assets (NPAs). Unfortunately such harsh and inhuman recovery-processes are initiated even on borrowings on residential properties without realising that affected borrowers and their family-members could become roofless in present most critical days of corona.
National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) should intervene and order Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and all banks to suspend with immediate effect all recovery-proceedings on borrowings at least against self-occupied residential properties. District Magistrates across the nation should be directed towards a clear worded notification that eviction-orders may not be passed for vacating self-occupied residential properties. If corrective measures are not immediately taken up, there is every possibility of starting a dangerous trend of family-suicides because small industrialists and traders are the worst affected categories of borrowers after economic slow-down as after-effect of unplanned demonetisation and GST-implementation even though both of these were supposed to be ideal features for a clean economy. Corona-crisis has further totally broken up borrowers who are finding it hard even to arrange for their daily needs what to talk about loan-repayment.
Even for future, loans may not be permitted against self-occupied residential properties to ensure that borrowers may not leave their families in trouble after their deaths which in several cases are suicides because of such hardships of loan-recovery on self-occupied residential properties.