Tax consultant ends life; wife & daughter consume poison

Gurgaon: Unable to pay off the “mounting debts”, all three members of a Gurgaon-based family have committed suicide over the past 10 days. Police said all the three consumed poison and left behind separate suicide notes, requesting authorities to waive off their loans and cremate them.
While 51-year-old tax consultant Hari Shetty was found dead at a city hotel on July 6, a week later his wife Veena (46) and their daughter Yashika (24) allegedly consumed poison at their rented flat in a Sector 67 residential society. The family moved into the society in January this year and had little interaction with other residents, police said.
In his suicide note, Hari spoke about the family’s financial troubles over the past one year and his failure to cope with the same.
His wife, who used to work with a private company but lost her job during the Covid pandemic, said in her suicide note that she did not want to live post her husband’s death and urged the chief ministers of UP and Haryana to waive off the pending bank loans on their Greater Noida flat and car.
Yashika, a law graduate, in her suicide note addressed to the Gurgaon police commissioner, listed out the furniture and other belongings of the family, including the flat and the car, and urged him to hand over the same to her maternal aunt who had helped the family in times of crisis. The mother-daughter duo also urged the government to cremate them at state expense.
According to police, both Hari and his wife lost their jobs during Covid last year. And over the past one year, the family had exhausted all their savings and were struggling to pay off their utility bills and bank EMIs. “Financial crisis was the main reason behind the tragic turn of events,” said Gurgaon police spokesperson Subhash Boken.
Police said no FIR has been lodged as they have not received any formal complaint “as no one has raised any doubt about the suicides”. The bodies have been handed over to their immediate family members after post-mortem. “After Hari died, some people tried to financially help the family, but by then the mother-daughter duo had gone into depression. They were unable to cope with the financial troubles,” said a police official.