Her UPA handlers may try to distance their Presidential nominee Pratibha Patil from the fraud in the bank she founded and its liquidation saying she didn’t sanction any loans when she was chairperson — but they should try telling that to angry and despairing depositors here.

An estimated 250 depositors, who had deposits of over Rs 1 lakh, now have little choice. They have got just the deposit insurance of Rs 1 lakh with no word on if and when they will get the balance.

Most of them are uneducated — some don’t even know how much they are supposed to get — and their deposits were the savings they and their relatives had put away over several years.

Many of them do not wish to be named fearing they may not get their arrears. However, there are those who go on the record, from a vegetable vendor to a retired government employee, to say how it was Patil’s “name” that got them to deposit their money only to watch the Pratibha Mahila Sahakari Bank turn into a family fiefdom and then sink.

As The Indian Express reported, an RBI inspection report alleged a slew of financial irregularities: loan waivers to her relatives and how six of the top ten defaulters were linked to Patil’s family. The RBI revoked the bank’s license in February 2003.

As he sits outside the shuttered bank premises in Jalgaon’s Mahatma Phule Market, 65-year-old Prabhakar Vedu Sonar, a retired field assistant in the state’s weights and measures department, fights back his tears. “I had invested my money and entire retirement benefits in the bank, Rs 1.4 lakh. Now they give me Rs 1 lakh which is the deposit insurance,” he says. “That’s over a third of my lifetime savings gone.”

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