Aisha Nasrin wasn’t surprised that her husband gave her a divorce; what unsettled her was that he killed her first.
Sometime in early 2022, I set out to find Aisha, mainly because I had seen her death certificate a few days earlier. According to this official document, issued on the letterhead of the eastern Indian state of Assam, she died of ‘natural causes’ on 21 October 2016 at her husband’s home in Faluguri village, a few kilometres from where the two of us now sat facing each other. We were perched on opposite edges of her bed. There was nothing spectral about the atmosphere. The bedsheet was crumpled, and a mosquito net covered three-quarters of the bed. If I extended my arm, it would touch her shoulder. She was quite definitely alive.
I asked her to tell me how she came to be declared dead. She began with the bizarre story of her marriage.
In 2015, Aisha had moved in with her in-laws in Faluguri, another village in the same district, after a wedding her husband didn’t want.
The marriage was doomed from day one—at least for her.
Finally, when Manzur could not bear being in the marriage any longer, he told her he was in love with another girl. After a fierce argument, he asked her to go back to her parents’ house; she packed her bags right away. Some days later, he rang her up to say he wouldn’t be bringing her back. Aisha accepted his wish and stopped thinking about him—that is, until she saw her own death certificate.
Six months after returning to her parents’ house, she found herself alone in the house again. She was sweeping the courtyard when a man—an investigator sent by an insurance company—entered the open gate. He was dressed formally and carried a plastic folder. After spotting her, he took a step back, as if unprepared for her presence. He then pulled out a form affixed with a passport-sized photo. The stranger held up the document in front of her.
‘He asked me if I knew the woman in the photograph,’ Aisha recalled. ‘I said it was me. He said Aisha Nasrin was dead. I said, “I am Aisha Nasrin, and I am alive.”’
She had every right to be shocked. Manzur had never told Aisha that he had purchased a life insurance policy in her name. Nor did he disclose any of the other crucial facts: that he listed himself as the nominee, and later submitted a forged death certificate, among other fabricated documents, to claim the payout.
I first learnt about Aisha’s fake death from an anti-corruption activist in Guwahati, the nearest city to Barpeta and the capital of Assam. He came to meet me and my colleague, Sadiq, at a table on the lawn of a plush hotel. He carried before him, like a standard, a thick folder stuffed with reports of fabricated deaths across Barpeta and adjoining districts.
Until then, I was under the impression that the faked death scams mostly happened in distant parts of the world. In the US, life insurance fraud accounts for approximately $74.7 billion annually, making it the second biggest category of insurance fraud.
In the UK, the Association of British Insurers detected 72,600 fraudulent claims worth almost $1.1 billion in 2022. India was lagging well behind the technological frontier here. One need hardly wonder why: with 44 per cent of Indians living below the median poverty line of $3.65 a day, life insurance can seem like a luxury. The fear of red tape is another deterrent. The vast majority of Indians are ill-equipped to be even clients of the formal economy, given the paperwork and bureaucracy involved.
Even though pitifully small in the Indian context, the middle class boasted millions of people whose top tier could easily afford Rs 1–2 lakh in annual insurance premiums. In 2021, 3.2 per cent of the Indian population, or 45 million people, had bought life insurance policies, making up $81.3 billion in total written premiums across twenty-four companies.
Just then, a welfare programme supported by the Government of India had begun to introduce life insurance to largely excluded parts of the population. The Prime Minister’s Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana (PMJJBY) offered a basic life insurance policy to rural low-income citizens aged between eighteen and fifty. It cost about Rs 350 a year and roughly paid out Rs 2 lakh when a policyholder died. Anyone could take out a policy by going to a local state bank.
There they would be asked to fill out a form and enclose documents to establish their identity. Eager to set a new standard for delivering welfare, the government emphasized the minimal documentation required and the speed at which claims were paid out. The process was fully digitalized, cutting out the need for physical verification; the money was to be transferred into a beneficiary’s account seven days after the death certificate as uploaded.
It is hard for major banks to open full-service branches across the vastness of India. So, if you don’t live close to one of them, you go to the nearest customer service point (CSP). A CSP is a common destination for every villager: this is where they go to open a bank account into which any benefit the government might owe them arrives, from old-age pension to fertilizer subsidy. All anyone needs to start a new CSP centre is a high school certificate and two local references. If your application is accepted by the banks, you can then become the authorized provider of essential banking services in your area.
Start-up costs are low: a laptop, a printer, a generic biometric machine that reads fingerprints and a room in which to conduct your business. Despite this modest set-up, in most rural areas— home to 70 per cent of Indians—the owner of the local CSP represented the awesome might of the Indian state. By being the entity in front of whom all villagers made their appeals, the government was no less powerful than God, and the CSP owner God’s local emissary.
Associated with not one but two CSPs in Faluguri, his own and his brother’s, Manzur took this role seriously. In the scheme’s first two years, he insured 500 people under the PMJJBY, the state’s low-cost insurance scheme. The government wanted its benefits to reach as many people as possible so that the cumulative goodwill would help it return to Parliament. Over the financial year 2020–21, 1,20,000 claims, amounting to Rs 2403 crore, were settled under PMJJBY across the country, aided by an impressive disposal rate of 99 per cent.
Aisha was proof that some of the dead were, in fact, still breathing. Manzur had insured other people under the scheme who had no knowledge of it.
One of them was a neighbour’s wife. Razia Begum did not know that Manzur had lured her husband into signing her up under the PMJJBY programme. She had opened a bank account at Manzur’s shop; he quietly used the same documents to take out a policy in her name. She had no idea that Manzur then reported her as dead. A string of collaborators helped, according to the paper trail we were able to access. Her death was registered at the local record office on account of her husband’s signature on the form. A ‘cause of death’ certificate was issued from the primary health centre, carrying the signature of the presiding doctor. No one knew whether Manzur forged their signatures or offered a commission.
If Manzur hadn’t bragged to his friends, Razia would have remained dead on paper for the rest of her life. But someone picked up on it from the steaming chain of village gossip. When the police began to collect reports of bogus insurance cases in and around Barpeta, enthusiastic informers pointed them to the robustly alive Razia Begum.
At one level, what was happening here wasn’t that different from the set-up I had already seen in Jharkhand: remote villages wrapped up in fraudulent activity that promised to uplift the whole community. Like a white-collar business but perhaps more meritocratic, with more opportunities for a clever person to succeed irrespective of where they stood on the social ladder.
Excerpted with permission from Penguin Random House
Scamlands: Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud That Preys on the World
Snigdha Poonam
Penguin Random House
Pp 344, Rs 799