Apps turned a Rs 5,000 loan into Rs 2.5-lakh debt, killed agriculture officer in Telangana
HYDERABAD: Agriculture extension officer Kirni Mounika, who ended her life due to harassment by firms running loan apps, took the loan not for herself but to help some farmers who were in distress to buy seeds and pesticides.
Some
hand-written notings in Mounika’s diary were discovered by the family
mentioning the amounts and names of farmers who she had helped with the
money to buy what they needed.
Mounika (25) consumed poison on
December 14 and succumbed two days later. She took the extreme step
after she was defamed by the instant loan apps which gave her small
amounts of loan which she could not repay in time.
“My daughter was
on her death bed when she sruggled to tell me something. I could not
understand immediately what she was trying to say. But I went through
some jottings in her diary, I found that she had helped some farmers by
taking the loan,” Mounika’s father Kirni Bhoopani of Rajagopalpet
village in Nanganur mandal told TOI on Thursday.
“As my mind was
full of my daughter’s memories, I got up at 1 am and went through a
notebook she had maintained as a diary. It has all the details,”
Bhoopani said. The amounts ranged from Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000.
“It
was a trap. When a small amount was not repaid in time, the instant loan
app gave her another loan through another app to repay the first loan.
In this way, they put money in 55 apps for my daughter,” Bhoopani said.
Effectively, a loan of just Rs 5,000, ballooned into a loan of Rs 2.6
lakh.
“I do not expect anyone to return the money. My family knows
only how to give and not take,” Bhoopani, an ex-sarpanch of
Rajagopalpet, said. The family owns some properties in Siddipet.
It was on December 13 that one of Mounika’s friends who had studied BSc (agriculture) with her called up Bhoopani and informed him about the messages that she had got about Mounika taking instant app loans.
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