January 18: Contributors of the Social Security Fund (SSF) can soon avail loan from the state-owned fund.

The SSF has prepared a draft of a new directive for implementing the investment work procedure, which once endorsed by the SSF board will pave way for providing loans to the contributors.

The draft, which outlines areas of investment and other issues, will be presented to the upcoming board meeting of SSF. Besides providing loan, SSF can also invest the collected amount if the draft is approved by the board. 

According to Deputy Executive Director of SSF Bivek Panthi, the draft will be implemented as soon as it gets approved by the SSF board.

The government had issued a work procedure for effective implementation of the SSF. As per the investment work procedure, the contributors can avail special loan, housing loan, educational loan and loan under the heading of social work.

The contributors can get loan up to 15 percent of their total contribution. There is a provision of providing loan equivalent to 15 years of salary of the contributor.

According to the government’s work procedure, the contributors of SSF can get a maximum of Rs 7.5 million under housing loan. Similarly, they can avail up to Rs 3.5 million for higher studies in foreign countries.

Those who seek loan from the SSF must have contributed to the fund for at least three years. However, the work procedure has not mentioned anything about the collateral and the evaluator. Therefore, the directive is required to clear these issues, says  Panthi, who is also the spokesperson of SSF.

So far, 13,089 employers and more than 185,000 workers have been listed in the SSF so far. It has already collected more than Rs 3.71 billion from the contributors.