Woman’s death puts banking societies under scanner
TRIVANDRUM: The death of a sick woman not being able to get proper medical treatment despite having savings to the tune of Rs 2.5 million has put Kerala co-operative banking societies under the scanner.
Philomena, 70, died in Thrissur’s Irinjalakuda town Wednesday after the Karuvannur Cooperative Bank allegedly failed to return the life savings of her and her husband.
Philomina, a retired nurse and her husband Devassy, 80, a former expatriate, entrusted their savings with the bank run by the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Devassy and their son Bino allege that the bank refused to return their savings and that his wife would have survived if she got better treatment at the hospital.
According to Bino, she was undergoing treatment for various age-related ailments at the Government Medical College Hospital in Thrissur.
He rejected higher education minister R Bindu’s claim that they had withdrawn more than Rs 400,000 and they were “playing politics” by parading the dead body.
“My parents withdrew some money much earlier, including for a knee ligament surgery for me. But they didn’t pay anything after my mum got hospitalised,” he said.
“We could not afford specialised treatment for lack of money even though all our savings were lying in the bank. It’s going to be the same if my father falls sick.”
Some of the people who attended the funeral of Philomina held on Thursday said they were also undergoing the same plight after depositing all their earnings at the “bank.”
There are some 1,700 primary agricultural societies and 1,200 rural and 16 urban co-operative banks and the CPI (M) controls 70 per cent of them.
In 2019, the Kerala State Co-operative Bank and 13 district cooperatives merged to float the Kerala Bank and it has 769 branches now.
A Rs 1-billion fraud was uncovered in the Karuvannur Cooperative Bank last year and the CPI (M) took disciplinary action against some of its officials.
The fraud involves forged signatures, fake transactions, remortgaged properties and several members getting payment notices for amounts they had never borrowed.
The scam surfaced after a former village council member committed suicide allegedly after receiving a foreclosure notice for such a fake “loan” account a year back.
According to a statement laid in the state assembly last week by the minister for the cooperatives, there are some 399 such “banks” facing charges of such irregularities.