Since the September 9, 2012 closure, while attention was on the loss of royalty, the fate of employees of mining companies and the impact on the investment climate in Goa, parents in homes in Sanguem and Quepem have had slightly different problems. Like not being able to afford school fees for their children or using the new car they bought because it involves petrol expenses. There are bigger worries too. Rotting machines like trucks and cranes, monstrous weights parked in their front yards and then barges moored to the banks of the river, rotting each day. Since their vehicles don’t run, on land or water and the machines don’t ply, the very assets that afforded them a changed lifestyle, with riches and fringe benefits are now like chains around their necks.
From an average monthly earning of over a lakh of rupees (at very modest calculations) for a family owning two trucks, family incomes have dropped drastically, sometimes by close to a hundred percent.
But this isn’t a new story, which has been reported extensively. Yet this old story has a new alarming dimension. The loans taken by those who bought trucks, barges and heavy machinery have not been paid taking the unpaid loan amounts across all banks and sectors to between Rs 1200 to Rs 1500 crores, including penal interest. For two years no one quite focused on this rising unpaid debt for assets, which were non-performing. So were they loans taken to acquire them.
The promise of the Chief Minister, now, to restructure the loans and push the banks to waive off interests, may have come far too late. Loan defaulters with the NPA tag, have a negative credit rating and most have sold off their assets to try and pay off loans. Even if mining resumes in a truncated form with a 20 million ton cap, most transport providers will simply not have their tucks, machines and barges and no credit rating to get fresh loans.
There has been a criminal neglect in addressing this by the present government. The Chief Minister should have left all else and set up a team to work on loan management of the mining dependents as a full time exercise. Instead the issue has been dealt with in fits and starts, mainly using lip service assurance to keep the gravy train of hope running when all resources were dry. Now even that gravy train has stopped, especially after the Lok Sabha elections, when the pre-election promise of managing their loan crisis, shows no signs of an early resolution. Now the Chief Minister has made a fresh one of tabling the loan restructuring policy on the floor of the house in the coming session. But till they don’t see their debt slate clean, policy assurances on restructuring loans will just be hope without any happiness.
The way forward has to be practical. By appealing to the banks and the RBI to waive off interests, so that the EDC of Goa can take on the loan burden and present a fresh structured payment plan, is riddled with road blocks. Banks in India have still not been declared as charitable institutions, they do business and while they rode the mining boom in Goa, with business growing due to the presence of over 400 mining traders, they need to recover money. Moreover Cooperative banks are accountable to shareholders whose hard earned savings make up the banks finances.
The Chief Minister has to think out of the box. There is 1.5 crore tons of removed ore lying on the ground across Goa. The combined value of this will be about Rs 2000 crores. This should be sold through auction and around Rs 1500 crores should be transferred to EDC, for it to take over the entire loan burden with interest. Once that is done, the deal will be directly between the state and the people with no other third party like banks. The government can declare a long term moratorium on repayment based on the resumption of mining.
That and that alone will ensure that each evening, when the sun sets in a mining village, there will be real sunrise the next morning.
