Its chairman Zahir Hassan said the money is crucial to ensure that students who enrol for technical and vocational education and training (TVET) will continue to benefit from loans extended by the revolving fund.

Zahir, who was speaking at the launch of the 2025 PTPK repayment promotion campaign here, said PTPK’s target for 2024 was to recover RM300 million in arrears but managed to collect only RM235 million.

Since it was established 25 years ago, PTPK has disbursed RM2.2 billion in loans to more than 400,000 students in TVET institutions. This includes the RM521.12 million allocated to 25,000 borrowers in 2024.

However, it has been unable to recover almost half of the money.

In October last year, its deputy chairman Rajiv Rishyakaran said RM933.9 million remained uncollected.

According to Zahir, PTPK ran similar campaigns to encourage borrowers to service their loans. One of it was to reward those who were consistent in their repayments.

“PTPK now has several initiatives to realise this (RM450 million) target, including legal action against defaulters,” he said.

He said the statutory body will also increase the number of external and internal collection agents.

Earlier, at the same event, human resources minister Steven Sim said the RM235 million recovered last year was the highest annual collection to date.

“That was a 50% increase from the previous year,” he said.

Sim said PTPK is working on improving its efficiency, including shortening loan approval time from up to a week to just one working day while the appeal process will be shortened to three working days.