Bihar Boys' Rs 900 Crore Surprise Not A First For This Rural Bank

Two children in a Bihar village recently became richer by nearly a thousand crore rupees, albeit momentarily, thanks to a technical glitch which was immediately rectified by the bank concerned.

Residents of Pastiya village in Azamnagar block of Katihar district have been, however, making a beeline to the local customer service point (CSP) centre to get their passbooks updated ever since hearing that a staggering amount of more than Rs 960 crore has been deposited into the accounts of Gurucharan Kumar and Asit Kumar.

The matter came to light on Wednesday when the boys went to the CSP centre to check if they had received the modest stipend to which they are entitled under a state government scheme for bearing the expenses of school uniforms.

While Gurucharan's account had been credited with Rs 905 crore, Asit's bank balance had swollen by Rs 62 crore.

Katihar district magistrate Udayan Mishra, however, assured that the matter has been taken care of.

"It was because of software error that entries were erroneously shown in some bank accounts. We informed the IT team in Patna about the anomaly and it has been fixed," he said.

Officials of the Uttar Bihar Gramin Bank, in which the two boys have their accounts, insist that the story being circulated in mainstream and social media is "misleading".

"The balance in the two respective accounts is tiny. We checked the details shared on the social media. The two account numbers which are being flashed as belonging to the two boys are fake," said Sanat Kumar, manager of the branch.

This is not the lone case of wrongful remittance by Uttar Bihar Gramin Bank.

Earlier this week, a resident of Khagaria had landed in jail when he used Rs 550 lakh erroneously transferred to his account and refused to do the needful when the bank asked him to return the sum. The man's plea was that he believed it was a "gift" from Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had famously spoken of "Rs 15 lakh into every account" during the election campaign of 2014.

Also, on Thursday night, Muzaffarpur district resident Bahadur Sah was taken aback when he got his passbook updated to check whether he had received the old age pension provided by the government and found that Rs 52 crore had been remitted to his account.

The resident of Katra police station area, however, is unlikely to face trouble as he raised an alarm and informed the police who got in touch with bank authorities.

Set up in 1976, the Uttar Bihar Gramin Bank caters to nearly half of the districts in the state. Of late, it has been in a mess and running huge losses.

There have been demands for its merger with a nationalised bank.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)