Sindhu A.V. of Manithara village in Kerala’s Avanoor panchayat, a nursing assistant in a private hospital, took a loan of ₹18 lakh from the Mundur branch of the Thrissur District Cooperative Bank sometime in 2014. She wanted to build a paying guest facility for medical students in her small plot near Thrissur Government Medical College Hospital. A 32-cent plot with a 2,000-sq-ft house in the name of her mother and sister was pledged as collateral.
In a freak accident, a concrete plank fell on her head, leaving her bedridden for more than two years. She lost her job and construction was disrupted. Sindhu started defaulting on the loan repayment, the EMI of which was about ₹29,000. “Debt started mounting. I thought of selling the property to close the loan. Then came demonetisation as a thunderbolt.”
In 2017, her husband’s friend introduced Sindhu to a private financier P. Satheesh Kumar, who allegedly promised to take over the loan and help find a new loan. She agreed, thinking that she could escape the mounting interest of the existing loan.
