The anatomy of a co-operative bank scam

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₹50 lakh to the very bank that turned her away. It was a clerical error, officials of the bank claimed. However, the truth emerged when she got a copy of the property’s encumbrance certificate, which establishes if the title is free, from the local village office.

Sailakshmi discovered her property had been leveraged for illicit loans, siphoning off ₹3 crore to unknown entities. And so began her five-year odyssey for justice, grappling with threats, scepticism, and societal apathy. Between 2019 and 2021, Sailakshmi found herself to be a lone voice in a sea of disbelief.

Nobody believed her story, with her own relatives saying it was impossible. She held a press conference in 2019, only to find journalists asking if she took them for idiots. No case was recorded at the police station and the cops even warned her not to complain about the bank again.

She searched the internet for higher authorities and visited the regional assistant registrar, who oversees cooperative banks in the district. But an officer there told her not to slander Karuvannur “because it’s the best bank in the district". Sailakshmi also knocked on the doors of the cooperative bank vigilance wing, but officials there said they couldn’t act without a police case.

She then contacted the state police vigilance unit, which said it couldn’t act without an FIR. Finally, she complained to the state’s Registrar of Cooperative Societies, which oversees cooperatives, in 2019. The Department of Cooperation came out with a damning report in 2020, which confirmed most of the allegations made by several complainants, including Sailakshmi and M.V.