Hyderabad: If you thought money brings happiness, think again. All that a woman in Kanpur whose account was out of the blue credited with an astronomical figure, making her the richest, is worried about is Rs 2,000.
One woman in Kanpur got immensely lucky as her bank account, opened through Jan Dhan Yojana, was credited with astronomical amount which the bank employees even struggled to pronounce. The difficulty to decipher as to why and how the whopping amount Rs 9,571,16,98,647 was credited to the account was next issue.
Urmila Yadav of Kanpur’s Vikas Nagar opened an account with SBI’s UPSIDC branch in Vikas Nagar in Kanpur as a part of the Central government’s Jan Dhan Yojana following which she received two text messages from the bank that shook her.
While the first one said her account had been credited with Rs 9,99,999, the other said that Rs 9.97 lakh had been deducted leaving a balance of Rs 2,000, the amount with which she had opened the account. However, this was only the first of the bigger shock that awaited her.
“I was constantly asking myself as to how this Rs 10 lakh came and went,” she said as she had never made any such ‘big’ transaction. Expectedly, she rushed to the bank with Lalta Prasad Tiwari, who had helped her open the bank account.
When her account was checked, there was a balance of Rs 9,571,16,98,647.14. For a while though she was richest person on earth. Even the bank officials, who could not even easily read or calculate the figure, were shocked to the core.
V.K. Srivastava, a senior clerk who also doubles up as the manager, said it might have happened because of a process undertaken to freeze a dormant account. Urmila’s account too was dormant for a while as she had not maintained the requisite balance.
Strange as it may sound, it was, according to the bank employees, a way to communicate to the account holder that he or she could no longer use the account. As a part of the process, the bank credited a made up figure and then deducted it.
Financial experts, however, maintain that rules do not allow banks from crediting and debiting any sum without the consent of the account holder. Hence, an inquiry is a must, they say. Even as the bank and experts are breaking their head over the legality of the procedure, the only worry of the unique beneficiary, is her original Rs 2,000.
