An account holder of the crisis-hit Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative (PMC) Bank died due to a heart attack hours after attending a protest March on Monday.
According to reports, 51-year-old Sanjay Gulati, an ex-employee of Jet Airways, has a deposit of over Rs 90 lakh with the troubled PMC bank.
Gulati, a resident of suburban Oshiwara, went to a protest march held outside a city court on Monday morning and had been under stress because of his deposit being stuck, said one of the agitating customers.
Gulati had attended the protest with his 80- year-old father. He died due to a heart attack while having dinner on Monday, a senior official at the Oshiwara police station was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.
According to reports, Gulati lost his job after the grounding of Jet Airways and is survived by a specially-abled son, who requires regular medical treatment.
After finding certain irregularities in the PMC Bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has barred the bank from carrying out almost all its routine banking activities for six months.
However, in a major relief for the customers, the central bank increased the withdrawal limit from Rs 10,000 to Rs 40,000.
The withdrawal limit was earlier set at Rs 1,000 and was raised gradually after protests.
Distressed depositors of the bank, which has deposits of over Rs 11,000 crore, have been protesting across the city and also forced Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to meet them last week when she was out to address a pre-election media conference here.
Sitharaman then urged RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das to urgently look into the woes of the depositors, after which the deposit withdrawal limits were hiked to Rs 40,000.
Sitharaman said that although the Finance Ministry has nothing to do with the PMC Bank matter since RBI is the regulator, she has asked the secretaries of the ministry to work with the Rural Development Ministry and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs to study in detail as to what is happening.
The bank has come on the regulatory radar after Housing Development & Infrastructure Ltd and its directors failed to repay a Rs 4,355 crore loan taken from PMC Bank putting the bank under liquidity stress.
Four people, including promoters of realty firm HDIL to which the bank made the sour loans, and the lender’s former chairman and ex-managing director have so far been arrested in connection with the alleged Rs 4,355 crore scam.