NEW DELHI, Apr 21: The union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has pulled up the State Bank of India concerned officials after a video went viral on social media showing a 70-year-old woman walking barefoot amid heatwave in Odisha with the support of a broken chair to collect her pension from the SBI.
And despite all the trouble, she was forced to return home empty-handed as her thumb impressions didn’t match with the banks records.
The incident happened in the Jharigaon block of Nabrangpur district of Odisha on April 17. The elderly woman in the video has been identified as Surya Harijan. Her older son is a migrant labourer in a different State. She stays with her younger son who grazes other people’s cattle for living. The family has no land to plough and lives in a hut.
Reacting to the incident, the SBI manager clarified that the woman faced trouble with withdrawing money because of her “broken fingers” and the bank was working to resolve the problem. “Her fingers are broken, so she is facing trouble withdrawing money. She has been given ₹3,000 manually from the bank. We will resolve the problem soon,” the SBI manager of the Jharigaon branch said.
The Sarpanch of her village also said they have discussed listing such helpless people in the village and providing pension money to them. In a similar incident in Odisha 2020, a 60-year old woman was seen dragging her 100-year old mother on a cot to the bank for withdrawing money from a Jan Dhan account. The manager of the bank in Nuapada district was later suspended.
(Manas Dasgupta)