The National Legislative Assembly will consider the expenditure request today.

Student Loan Fund (SLF) Manager Prempracha Supasamout said the Cabinet approved a request for Bt36 billion - a Bt6 billion increase from this year.

About Bt5 billion of this sum would be allocated to the Income Contingency Loan (ICL) scheme and the rest Bt31 billion for SLF would be divided into two groups of loan recipients, 600,000 old SLF debtors and 300,000 new loaners, he said. The new scheme - to take effect in the next academic year (in May 2007) - would follow SLF model that was believed to thoroughly benefit all loan recipients and the country, he said.

Prempracha said the new loan programme would focus on helping poor students, so the eligible recipients' family income limit would be less than Bt150,000 per year.

However, Prempracha admitted that this SLF-modelled income ceiling was a weak point, as it was difficult to determine the real financial status of the students, thus teachers at first must help screening for qualified loan applicants.

He said that the information technology would be used later on to analyse the poverty line to screen the suitable students, he said.

The new loan scheme's repayment would also follow the SLF's - in which debtors start to repay with one per cent interest rate two years after graduation or when their salaries reached Bt4,700, he said.

For example, the first-year repayment for Bt100,000 debts was only Bt1, 500 per year or Bt125 per month.

"If the loan recipients stopped sending mobile short messages for only two days, they would have enough money to repay the debts," he said.