It is inhuman to make depositors beg for their money back

Reserve Bank of India. File pic

Depositiors of Punjab & Maharashtra Co-operative (PMC) Bank, which went under in 2019, have held two protests outside the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) within a span of a few days. These bank customers who have their money stuck in the scam-hit entity are rejecting certain conditions for a draft scheme for amalgamation of the bank, where they will get their money in staggered amounts and the full amount is supposed to be returned in 10 years.

While there are too many technicalities to be discussed here about amalgamation and recourse for depositors of stressed banks, it is vital that the depositors are allowed to get back their money much sooner than 10 years.

As reports in this paper and elsewhere have cited, there are so many senior citizen depositors and it is grossly unfair that they suffer so deeply and in fact, in such distressing ways. Already humiliated beyond measure and reduced to begging from friends and relatives, one cannot even imagine the trauma they are facing. Their lives have been upended because of corruption and fraud. Dreams lie in tatters; lives have been lost and the agony has been unimaginable.

We need involvement and action from the highest now, direct intervention to help get their money back, instead of committees, schemes and reports which hold little water.

To be unable to ensure that the depositors get back their money is heinous to say the least. We want to see the leaders get involved instead of passing the buck, on humanitarian grounds if nothing else, and ensure that they get back their entire savings within a much shorter time than is envisaged.

If credible and extremely disturbing accounts of lives hanging by a thread do not move our leaders to do something, then what will? These people have done nothing to deserve this unwarranted suffering, while those at fault are yet to be punished.