People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Mysuru, has welcomed the State government’s decision to resend the Karnataka Micro Loan and Small Loan (Prevention of Coercive Actions Ordinance 2025) for reconsideration to Governor Thaarwarchand Gehlot without any changes but with proper explanations.
A statement issued by PUCL Mysuru president Kamal Gopinath and general secretary V. Purushottam said the Governor’s office, in the clarifications it had sought, had displayed a clear ‘anti-people’ sentiment by trying to advocate the cause of the ‘unregistered and unlicensed microfinance lenders’ though the actions of these lenders were blatantly illegal and without any legal sanction.
PUCL expressed “utter surprise” at a constitutional entity like the Governor “siding with “something blatantly illegal” by praising unregistered and unlicensed lenders, who were the “root of the microfinance crisis” in Karnataka. “The Governor, while batting for the lenders, has also failed to explain how the Ordinance infringes on the rights of the lenders while on the other hand, we are counting suicides by people of vulnerable sections, owing to the actions of the lenders themselves,” the statement said.
Lauding the Karnataka government for remaining firm in its reply to the Governor, PUCL opined that the State government was correct in its stand that these unlicensed entities did not, in the first place, have the right to either lend or seek recovery as they were functioning outside the laws regulating microfinance institutions.
PUCL urged the Governor to allow the passage of the Ordinance and desist the urge to trigger a legal tussle as such a move will cause untold hardships to the poor and economically downtrodden victims of these unlawful institutions and their ‘deadly’ coercions.
Published - February 11, 2025 08:41 pm IST
