In this freezing temperatures where one and all including the traders are shivering not because of the cold temperature and the frequent and unscheduled power cuts, but yet another devastation is set on their heads through various banks who are ready to freeze their accounts as non performing assets (NPA’s) as the most of the business, personal and other loan accounts are not credited with installments or interest servicing. The banks especially the local J & K Bank is aware that the business community is in a devastating state of affairs due to the officially enforced lockdown since August 5 last year and people were yet to wake up from the shock, yet another lockdown was enforced to prevent the spread of Covid-19 Pandemic. The two dissipating lockdowns have ruined the complete business activity in Kashmir except for the business of healthcare products and to some extent the food products. All other business activities especially those which swell the markets with customers and channelizes the circulation of funds i.e. tourism and Kashmir art sector. In short it is the complete lull in the market and traders are facing huge difficulties in even feeding their families.
For the last one week, the bank customers/traders who have raised loans from banks for their businesses or any other products are facing shockers in the shape of the guarantors, where the banks have either frozen accounts of these poor guarantors or the banks have deducted installments or in some cases, the banks have raised overdrafts on the accounts of the guarantors to debit it for servicing the loan accounts. In many cases, emotional scenes have been witnessed where these guarantors were seen fighting with their friends/relatives for whom they stood as guarantors.
For a businessman or a small scale trader, bank is considered as the best friend/councilor or the business partner but unfortunately for the last few years in the ill fated Kashmir valley, the bank, instead of behaving as a friend has turned foe and it is in disgracing their own business partners, the customer. No doubt there are some habitual defaulters who have been deliberately causing inconvenience to the bankers, but their number as per the data available is less than 2%, while as majority of customers can be categorized as “honest” people. However, there has been a trend prevalent in Kashmir where the young and over enthusiastic bank officers are behaving as loyal as the king and feel pride in disgracing the hapless and otherwise “Honb’le” customers/citizens. There is no doubt that the bank is the custodian of the faith and trust of the depositors and have to secure their trust by securing their hard earned money but the same bank officials fall flat when it comes to the influential and big business houses. There are hundreds of instances where our own Jammu & Kashmir Bank has turned their eyes blind, given rebates or closed the huge advances by applying a method of writing off the account from the books. In J&K Bank there are hundreds of such accounts of very influential people like politicians, pro government activists and influential businessmen whose loan accounts have been written off which has caused the bank a huge loss of several hundred crores. However, the bank behaves very strictly against small traders or tiny individuals who mostly are failed because of the prevailing unfriendly situation on ground. And, the officials who exercise their might to make them bow before them in the name of ‘Pressure from top management” and the top management pleads they are under threat from Reserve Bank of India(RBI), but in RBI guidelines no where a condition that the borrower should bring 2-3 guarantors who are government employee’s. The executives and officials forget that they alone in this unfortunate society are prosperous with glamorous life style because of the income of the bank from these meager customers who have been paying huge interest on the loans from their hard earned money.
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