Minister for Finance Biman Prasad says forgiving Tertiary Education Loans Scheme (TELS) debt will not have an impact on government revenue collection for the 2023-2024 National Budget.

As of 2022, the Government had $581 million in outstanding TELS debt.

Mr Prasad said forgiving this debt would not have an impact on government’s revenue collection because the repayment rate was almost insignificant given the level of debt.

However, he said that Government had lost close to $100million because students who had taken loans under the Tertiary Education Loan Scheme had dropped out of universities.

“On average we were collecting $5 to $6million per year,” Mr Prasad said.

“So, if you are talking about the impact, it will be a small impact on government revenue collection,” he said. “It will not have a significant impact on government revenue if we forgive that in the next budget.”

He added that the $100million lost to students who have dropped out of university led to a loss of funding or funding that cannot be recovered because the students could not pay the loan.

He said that was funding wasted through a scheme that was not managed properly so that was why it was being reviewed.

New Scholarship Scheme 

He added that a new scholarship scheme to replace the original loan scheme was going to put out certain criteria for people at all levels and not just those going to university can be systematically trained.

“We will be allocating funding to technical institutes that will provide competency-based training in areas like construction, for example we train people to start laying tiles, paint, basic carpentry work,” Mr Prasad said.

“Tourism and hotel operators are bringing in villagers to work in hotels, what we want to do is support those types of skill-based training. This would help provide skills to bridge the gap of those that are travelling to work overseas.

“We are also reviewing our immigration policies making sure that we may need labourers from outside of the country and to facilitate this we may need to make our immigration more efficient and more responsive to investors.”

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