Finding Freedom

It was 5 o’ clock in the evening when the soothing sound of a conch shell was drowned by the irreconcilable wail of her mother, along with many women from the village, when they suddenly learnt how their life’s savings had been duped. Recollections of that incident still sends a chill down her spine, says Chobi Hembram (29) hailing from a remote village of Shantiniketan in West Bengal. Most poor households of the village have been saving their hard-earned earnings in banned chit funds like Sharadha, with little knowledge of the Ponzi scheme. The scam that duped millions of low-income naive depositors led to a series of suicides. Hembram recalls how her mother was blind to the sugar-coated assuring words of an agent and ended up losing Rs 2 lakh. “It started when my neighbour cheerfully announced how she was investing in an LIC product and was reaping great...