The Andhra Pradesh government, further to its efforts to protect the borrowers from being fleeced by microfinance institutions, has formed implementation, legal, capacity building and IT committees. These committees would work to improve the credit flows to self help groups and also put in place an IT system for efficient implementation of the ordinance.
According to rural development department principal secretary R Subhramanyam, the implementation committee will be responsible for receiving and clarifying queries from the registration authority on a daily basis, reviewing complaints from public about MFI irregularities and checking if cases are booked on these. It will also talk to the banks for improving the credit flow.
The legal committee will monitor the cases in High Court and Supreme Court and prepare detailed remarks in the cases filed by the MFIs against the ordinance.
The capacity building committee will prepare material for educating the SHG members and the IT committee will guide the Centre for Good Governance team in consolidating the database.
It will also create and maintain a website for MFIs integrating the database of SHG-bank linkage, ration cards and borrowers data submitted by the MFIs so as to arrive at an integrated database of rural and urban indebtedness. This would also generate reports, which would show details of multiple and over lending and irregularities. All the committees will report on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, rural development minister Vatti Vasantha Kumar accepted a debate on the MFI issue after Opposition leader N Chandrababu Naidu said the government failed in protecting the interests of poor women.
The minister said the state government reacted sharply to bring an ordinance to protect women from harassment by the MFIs. There is no pressure on the state government to relax restrictions on MFIs from any quarter, he clarified.