Bangalore: The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has requested the government to ask the banks to restructure the education loans. This comes as a big relief for those engineering graduates who may find it difficult to repay their educational loan, due to the current economic downturn.

According to a study by NASSCOM, nearly 4,51,700 engineering students will be graduated in a month's time. With the gloomy economic condition, there are only limited job opportunities with lower packages available for these graduates. Since this is a challenging scenario for the graduates to repay their loan, the nodal body of the software industry has taken the decision of approaching the government. NASSCOM is also working to build a partnership between the government and the academia to enable students in getting wider training opportunities through government run projects.

Recently, the Indian Banks' Association (IBA) had urged the banks to look into the tenure of education loans to help the borrowers to cope with the current economic situation. According to Rupee Times, some of the banks like Indian Bank, Central Bank of India and Catholic Syrian Bank have already started working on restructuring education loans on the request of students. Indian Bank has rephrased nearly 7,801 education loans, with a total outstanding of Rs 99.24 crores.