Soft loans offered for teachers' debt crisis
Teachers with academic allowances will be able to seek soft loans to repay their debts to non-formal moneylenders or credit card companies, if they agree to join training schemes on sensible spending and pledge to embrace sufficiency economy theory.
Teachers can apply for the loans in early March. "After receiving the soft loans, these teachers won't be able to get further funding," the Education Ministry's permanent secretary Jaruayporn Thoranin said yesterday. She said applicants would need to detail their debts so the ministry could gather the data needed to tackle the issue. The information will be presented to the Deputy Education Minister Varakorn Samkoses, Jaruayporn said. According to the Office of Welfare for Teachers (OTEP) last year about 800,000 government teachers, including those in retirement, had combined debts of at least Bt200 billion. This was a sharp increase from Bt139 billion in combined debts in 2005. The 2006 figure comes solely from loans granted by 141 teachers' savings co-operatives across the country while the 2005 debts were from loans granted by the teacher savings cooperatives, banks and non-formal lenders. "This means the average teacher has debts of about Bt250,000," Jaruayporn said. The 2005 figure was based on data from 131,417 teachers who reported their debts while seeking to join another debt-clearance programme.
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