Bihar: Villagers carry man’s body to bank, demand funeral money from account

PATNA: A 60-year-old bachelor with no living relatives dies at his home in a village in rural Patna. His neighbours find the body, search his house for money to cremate him, but find no money or valuables except for a passbook that showed he had Rs 1 lakh in his bank account.
What the villagers of Singriyawan did next is what they thought was the best solution — ask the bank to release cash from Mahesh Yadav’s account for his funeral. So they carried the dead body decorated with flowers to the bank and demanded that the manager release money for the funeral.
According to Shahjahanpur police station SHO Amrendra Kumar, the villagers wanted the bank to disburse at least Rs 20,000 from Mahesh’s account, which had Rs 1.18 lakh.
“Mahesh was unmarried. His brother had died several years ago. There was no one in his family. Mahesh lived in a hut built on someone else’s land,” the SHO told TOI on Wednesday. He quoted Mahesh’s neighbours as saying that if a man's money can't be used for his funeral than what good is that money.
The SHO said Mahesh was a daily wager and earned around Rs 100 to Rs 200. He lived in Singriyawan all his life and died in sleep early on Tuesday. “The villagers came to know about his death around 5 am on Tuesday. By 6 am, they called the bank manager for money before reaching with the body at the branch around 9.30 pm,” he said.
The body lay inside Canara Bank’s Singriyawan branch disrupting work as the standoff continued for nearly three hours, which ended only after branch manager Sanjeev Kumar handed them Rs 10,000 from the CSR fund and Singriyawan mukhiya gave Rs 5,000 more from his pocket.
The manager said he was bound by rules and could not take out money from Mahesh’s account.
“We have been asking him (Mahesh) for the last two years to complete his KYC formalities and mention the name of his nominee. However, he didn’t comply fearing someone might take away all the money from his account," Sanjeev said.
The manager also said due to the non-completion of KYC, Mahesh got barred from making any withdrawals for the past eight months as banks had instructions to stop transactions from such accounts.
“We had never seen any such situation till now in our banking service,” he said, adding, as per the law if no legal heir turns up in a decade then the money lying in his account will be reversed to the Reserve Bank of India.
The SHO said the matter was raised at the general manager’s level for a solution and it was only after that the branch released money from its CSR fund.
Singriyawan panchayat sarpanch Aananti Devi told this newspapers that she knew Mahesh and that he was of humble nature, who always helped others. “Due to his good nature, everyone in the village, especially his neighbours, used to help him with food and other things. I had also seen him on several occasion. However he was keeping ill for the last few days,” she said.
She said on Tuesday his neighbour, who checked-in on him, saw no movement inside Mahesh’s hut. “They looked inside to found him dead. He used to work for anyone who offered him some work. He had gathered a good amount of money,” she added.