Kozhikode: The Kerala Gramin Bank (KGB) allegedly persecuted the widow of a ‘farmer defaulter’ by refusing to return the title-deed of the land even after the widow and her three daughters paid the loan amount in March this year. The farmer had committed suicide unable to withstand the alleged harassment of the bank officials years ago.
Interestingly the bank claims that the documents were destroyed on direction from the High Court! Anandavally, the widow of Vasudevan, the farmer who had committed suicide told DC that she had remitted the conciliatory amount of Rs 57,000 fixed early in an adalat in March this year itself but the bank authorities continues to harass her whenever she asked for the documents.
It is to be recalled that the branch was recently in the news for executing an eviction petition which resulted in imprisonment of another farmer, Sukumaran, on October 31, despite attaching his 75 cents of land. The bank which remained closed for almost a week due to a public protest, started functioning only the other day.
“I have been visiting the bank countless times and at last the manager told me that the document was set on fire on directions from the High Court which I feel is a wrong claim”, she added. “Earlier the same bank manager had assured us that the document would be returned as soon as we remitted the amount. We also sold ten cents of land expecting that we would receive the document soon. Now we have to pay compensation to the man or we have to face legal proceedings”, she added.
Anandavally suspects that somebody might have pledged her land misusing the original documents with the connivance of the bank.
It is to be recalled that four years ago M.R. Vasudevan, a small farmer living at Irulam, a village situated on the fringes of the jungle committed suicide in July 2011 when KGB, Irulam branch, attached his property of 1.02 acres land without considering the long-term relationship between himself and the bank. “He took a loan of Rs 50,000 from the bank in 2002 of which Rs 35,000 was an agricultural loan and Rs 15,000 was non-agricultural loan. “The agricultural loan was written off and for the remaining Rs 15,000 we were asked to pay Rs 2,27,000 in total which later was reduced to Rs 57,000 after a series of settlement talks,” said Sukumaran, son-in-law of Anandavally. “We are all set to take legal measures against the bank,” he added.
The newly appointed bank manager P.R. Rajan also told DC that he was yet to confirm the veracity of the documents handed over to him by the former manager. The communiqué claimed to have been sent by a court says that the document was ‘destroyed’ after direction from the High Court. “I also don’t believe that the HC would issue such a direction,” he adds.
However Mr Rajan sought ‘one week’s’ time from the family to give them the ‘real’ information about the whereabouts of the document.
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