Unwarranted action
Some financial including banks have allegedly threatened traders of Kashmir that they will take over their properties if they will not pay back loans.
Several newspapers in Kashmir recently published a full-page advertisement with a heading: We owe you money, not respect and honour. The unusual advertisement was published on the behalf of 22 Kashmiri trade bodies, most of them associated with the tourism sector.
The trade bodies said the business community was completely devastated and exhausted after August last year. They said in the advertisement that their survival is under threat and their humble submission to the banks is that at once, stop calling them defaulters. They further said that they believed there may be two types of defaulters — willful, which they as community strongly protest to be called or named as, and circumstantial, which they have been forced to be because of government clampdown for months.
The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industries (KCCI) in its ‘Economic Loss Assessment Report’, released in December last year, said the Valley’s economy had suffered a loss of Rs 17,878.18 crore since August 5.
With such huge losses the government should intervene and the banks should be told not to intimidate these traders as they have been at the receiving end of the situation prevailing in Kashmir. With months of lock down and no sign of tourism revival, the banks should stop threatening the traders especially those connected with tourism trade.
