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Haves and have-nots, chained by loss-Sanjay Mandal
-The Telegraph


Bengal - Defrauded

Many households in Calcutta have a domestic help or a driver who has lost money by investing in Saradha schemes - a common thread that has spun a perception that the poor are the sole victims of the sham company.

But Sudipta Sen's promise of high returns had blurred the divide between the haves and the have-nots as well as the educated and the uneducated.

Travels across the semi-urban and rural belts in South 24-Parganas, a district with a high concentration of duped depositors, have thrown up profiles that cut across income and social barriers.

There is little doubt that the poor were affected the most but there are also some exceptions. If a rag-picker was defrauded, so was a family of retired schoolteachers - with affluent sons - who trusted the Trinamul government more than their instincts honed by postgraduate degrees.

A diverse set of investors signed up with Saradha schemes for different reasons - from securing the future to saving money for a daughter's wedding - and deposited amounts that varied from several lakhs to a few thousands.

Almost all conceded during conversations with this correspondent that one common factor played a key role in inspiring confidence in Saradha: a perceived proximity with the ruling establishment, which the depositors viewed as a safety valve.

The Telegraph tells the stories of the two classes of investors.

The have-nots

Fatema Bibi Khatun and her husband Mosharaf Sardar - from Champahati in Baruipur, around 25km from Calcutta - fell for the Saradha schemes as the rag-picker family found them the best available option to augment their income.

Deposit collections from Baruipur in South 24-Parganas, which had the largest concentration of Saradha agents in the state, have been among the highest and people like Fatema were contributing to the kitty.

Champahati is one of the 19 gram panchayats under the Baruipur block, where Trinamul had won 15 panchayats in the 2008 rural polls. Most of the gram panchayats had branch offices of Saradha, along with a division office near Baruipur railway station.

"Saradha and its agents gave generous donations to local pujas, sponsored cultural programmes of clubs and kept ambulances to take patients to hospitals and they gained credibility in the area," said Dilip Biswas, Trinamul pradhan of Ramnagar II gram panchayat.

The rag-picker couple had been depositing Rs 3,000 - out of a monthly family income of Rs 5,000 - each month for the past 15 months to marry off their daughter. For the Rs 45,000 deposited, they were promised Rs 52,000 on March 29 for the daughter's wedding that was scheduled for last Friday (May 10).

"We didn't get the money on the promised day.... We were told that the money will be available on April 16, but when we went to the office in Champahati, it was locked," recounted Fatema, standing outside their thatched house in a slum in Solgohalia village.

The couple then decided to call off the wedding. Some residents in the neighbourhood, however, bailed out the family by offering a loan of Rs 30,000.

"Jerokom koshto kore taka jomiye chilam, serokom koshto kore dena shodh korbo. (The amount of hardship we took to accumulate the money, now we'll undertake the same hardship to repay the loan)," said Fatema.

Almost every household - around 650 of the 700-plus families - had deposits with Saradha or some other company, an indicator of the extent to which the money marketing companies had penetrated one of the poorest zones in the Baruipur block.

Most people in the area are day labourers, rag-pickers and domestic helps - the source of the human capital that keeps the levers of affluent households in Calcutta moving. In groups, they board local trains between 4am and 4.30am and get off at Park Circus and Ballygunge and return home late in the evening.

"We don't have the time to go to a bank to deposit our money. Once or twice we went to a bank but the people there asked for too many papers and so we couldn't open an account," said Gulshan Biwi, who had deposited Rs 5,000 with Saradha Realty and was promised a return of Rs 20,000 in seven years.

Take the case of Sajal Nunia, 41, a marginal farmer, who works as a day labourer to supplement his family's income and earns around Rs 3,000 every month. In August 2011, he sold six cottahs for Rs 2.5 lakh, out of which he used Rs 1.5 lakh to build a house and kept the remaining Rs 1 lakh with Saradha Realty with a promised return of Rs 4 lakh after seven years.

"The agent explained that since Trinamul was with the company, I won't lose my money," said Nunia. "But now I know, I have lost everything."

The haves

Ramprasad Sardar, 63, a retired high school mathematics teacher in Champahati, and his wife Annapurna, had together invested Rs 8.5 lakh in Saradha scheme.

They haven't lost everything but have realised the pitfalls of investing without due diligence.

Sardar and Annapurna were educated enough to calculate that the company was offering them an annualised return of more than 20 per cent. The postgraduate couple have investments with public sector banks and have taken insurance policies.

One of their two sons is in the US and the other is an employee with an IT company.

The couple signed up for the Saradha schemes even though Annapurna harboured some doubts about the credibility of the company. The doubts, however, were swept away when the agents played the most potent credibility card.

"I was told by the agents, all of them my former students, that the state government was with the company and till the day Trinamul was in power, there wouldn't be any problem. We had invested our money in five-year schemes, keeping in mind the term of the present government," Ramprasad said.

The overt association of Trinamul leaders with the Saradha Group helped him convince his wife as all the agents had showed him photographs of Sudipta Sen, the Saradha chief, along with Trinamul MP Kunal Ghosh and minister Madan Mitra at various events.

According to him, he was aware that Ghosh was the CEO of the company's media group, which was seen as a vocal supporter of the Trinamul-run government.

"We thought that we would be making a mistake if we were not investing in a company that was promising such high returns," said the retired math teacher.

They invested Rs 7 lakh in Saradha Realty and Rs 1.5 lakh in Saradha Tours and Travels.

Till February this year, Ramprasad received a monthly return of Rs 7,600 but problems started in March. In April, he was told that there would be a delay and he was asked to visit the local office on Champahati Main Road on April 16.

But by then, the Saradha bubble had burst and the company had shut its offices.

"I tried my best to get at least the principal back but that didn't happen.... A significant part of my savings is gone," rued the schoolteacher, who had invested in Saradha schemes through three of his students who had worked as Saradha agents.

As part of the Saradha strategy, the agents tried to sign up opinion-makers in the society so as to use their names to get more depositors.

Rajib Kumar Baidya, a homeopath practitioner near Champahati railway station, was one such victim. A Saradha agent signed Baidya up for a scheme with similarities to recurring deposits offered by banks.

Baidya was saving Rs 600 per month for 15 months. Against the deposit of Rs 9,000, he was promised Rs 10,500. "I received the amount twice but this time I didn't get it," said Baidya.