Conditions for brides-to-be
MEERA VOHRA
The marriage market in North India has a new condition for brides-to-be – no education loan.
Shashikant (name changed), an advocate in the Allahabad High Court, was a trifle surprised when he was advised by his close friends not to play up the education loan taken for his daughter’s degree in dentistry while looking for a groom for her. But that’s how things are in the marriage market these days. Not only is a bride expected to be fair, convent-educated, English speaking and homely, she also has to be loan free. With parents increasingly turning to education loans to fund their children’s education, prospective in-laws are keen to know whether the bahu-to-be comes with the burden of paying off an education loan since an education loan has to be paid off by the student. So marriage alliances are dependent on the status of loan repayment – pay it off before tying the knot is the new demand coming from grooms’ families.
Sangeeta Bhattacharya, a graduate from Banaras Hindu University took an education loan to pursue her MBA from Pune. After the completion of her course, when her parents began looking for a match for her, questions about her education loan would invariably always crop up. “Almost all the guys would ask me about the status of the education loan. I was not offended since I believe that there should be transparency in matters of marriage,” she says.
Admitting to this trend is Kiran Chawla, who runs a franchise of a marriage bureau. “Education loans are figuring prominently in fixing matrimonial alliances these days. The most common query that comes from the boy’s family is whether an education loan has been taken by the girl or not and the clearing of the loan is the primary condition for a match to be arranged. The prospective in-laws are not ready to take the risk of paying the loan if it is still unpaid," she says. “While a well-educated girl is still sought after, that demand comes with a no-debt rider,” according to Chawla.
The notion that once a girl is married, the onus of her well-being is entirely on the in-laws is a well ingrained one. “This notion makes the in-laws apprehensive of education loans,” says Gopalji Ojha, assistant manager, advance, State Bank of India, Kanpur. “There have been several cases where the payment of the education loan became a complicated issue once the female borrower got married. We had a case of a girl who had taken a loan for pursuing a course in mass communication from Punjab University. Once she got married, the repayment installments stopped coming. Since her father was the co-applicant for the loan, we contacted him. He very politely informed us that since his daughter is married, so we should approach her for the repayment of the loan as it now becomes the duty of her husband to clear the debt. When we checked with the girl, she said that her husband was not interested in repaying the loan and that she would request her father to do it,” narrates Ojha, to illustrate the complications he was referring to.
