70-year-old woman walks barefoot in scorching heat to collect pension from bank

Bhubaneswar: In a distressing incident, a 70-year-old woman in Odisha had to walk for several kilometres barefoot amid a heatwave to get her pension from the bank, but State Bank of India (SBI) employees returned her as her thumb impression didn’t match with their records. The incident reportedly happened in the Jharigaon block of Nabrangpur district of Odisha on April 17.

The video of the incident has gone viral on social media. In the viral video, the frail old woman can be seen walking barefoot in scorching heat with the support of a broken chair.

Sharing the video on Twitter, Union Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman pulled up SBI for the plight of the woman.

“Can see the manager of the @TheOfficialSBI responding but yet wish @DFS_India and @TheOfficialSBI take cognisance of this and act humanely. Are they no bank Mitra?” she asked on Twitter, while responding to the video.

As per reports, the elderly woman, Surya Harijan, is very poor. Her older son is working as a migrant labourer in a different state. She is staying with her younger son’s family and he makes his living grazing other people’s cattle. The family has no land to plough and lives in a hut.

The lady went to the bank to get the pension, but she was told that her thumb is not matching the records, and she was forced to return home.

Reacting to the incident, the SBI manager has claimed that she is facing trouble in withdrawing money because of her “broken fingers” and the bank is working to resolve the problem.

“Her fingers are broken, so she is facing trouble withdrawing money. She has been given Rs 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 that they have discussed listing such helpless people in the village and providing pension money to them.

In a similar incident in Odisha in 2020, a 60-year-old woman had to drag 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.