Cabinet approves loans for resettled

http://www.defence.lk/new.asp?fname=20100908_02

Cabinet approves loans for resettled
Minister of Rehabilitation and Prison Reforms D. E. W. Gunasekera said that he had obtained Cabinet approval to grant Micro financing for self employment and housing loans to the lowest segments of the Tamil society in the North and East.
He said that loans up to a maximum of Rs 250,000 would be granted through the AGA s and District Secretariats by the Bank of Ceylon at low interest rate of 4 percent per-annum with a repayment period of over 10 years.
He said that the Chairman of the Bank of Ceylon Dr. Gamini Wickremasinghe had agreed to release Rs. 100 million which would be dispensed as Micro loans by the end of December 2010.
Following representations made by the general public at Mobile Service Clinics in Jaffna, Kilinochchi and Vavuniya recently, the Minister submitted a Cabinet Paper after taking into consideration the plight of the lowest segment of the Tamil people who had no one to turn to for any sort of assistance to uplift their lives through self employment or construct a shelter over their head.
The Former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka said that the special feature of the mobile service clinics was that 99.9 per cent were women. The majority of them were marginalized as a result of the caste system prevalent in the Northern Region.
Many of those women were either young widows who had lost their husbands to the conflict or those whose husbands were in custody and had suffered a lot by being sandwiched as a result of the conflict between the LTTE and the Security Forces.
The Micro loans would be granted in coordination with the Ministries of Rehabilitation and Prison Reforms, National Housing Development Authority and Economic Development.
Branch office of the Ministry of Rehabilitation is to be opened in Vavuniya shortly so that the people need not travel to Colombo, as in the past, to obtain Bank loans and none would need political affiliations to get these loans approved.
Courtesy : The Island