DEADLY BUSINESS

On March 16, shortly after 13-year-old Tushar, a Class 6 student, went missing from his house in Patna's Kanhauli village, his father, Raj Kishore Pandit, received a ransom call on WhatsApp.

- Amitabh Srivastava

The kidnapper wanted Pandit, a government schoolteacher, to pay up Rs 40 lakh for the safe return of his son. Three days later, police recovered the boy's charred body from a secluded spot and arrested the alleged perpetrator-Mukesh Pandey, 28, who ran a coaching centre and private school in the same locality.

Police claim Pandey, confronted by private moneylenders from whom he had borrowed Rs 20 lakh, found an easy target in his former student Tushar, who unsuspectingly accompanied the accused only to be strangled to death, his body later burnt to hide evidence. Pandey then allegedly started sending ransom messages to Pandit using Tushar's phone. When nabbed on March 19, say police, he was still carrying his victim's phone.

The vicious circle of debt owing to exorbitant interest rates charged by private moneylenders in Bihar (at times as high as 10 per cent per month) has often brought out the worst in the borrowers, and Pandey's is yet another case in point. The latest Crime in India report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) records as many as 452 murders for 'financial gain' in Bihar in 2021. This was 27 per cent of such murders reported across the country (1,692) that year. A senior IPS officer posted in the state suggests that a good number of these murders could be directly linked to moneylending.