Life Insurance for the Dead

A wave of fraudulent claims swept through the rural villages of India's northeast, until police crackdowns and Covid seemed to snuff them out-for a while, anyway | faked death

- By Snigdha Poonam and Sadiq Naqvi

Amina Parbin was alone, sweeping the floor of her parents’ home, when a man arrived on a January day in 2017 with a file in his hands. He introduced himself as a life insurance investigator and began pulling out papers. A payout claim. A passport photo. A death certificate—her death certificate. “Did you know Amina?” he asked.

“I am Amina,” she responded, and “I am, in fact, alive.”

It took seemingly Parbin’s entire family—with her brothers and uncles rushing over from their farms and shops—to prove to the investigator that she was the victim of some kind of fraud. They eventually persuaded him to turn over the paperwork he’d brought. And that’s how Parbin learned that a claim had been filed for an insurance policy on her life, one she never even knew existed. The claimant: her estranged husband.

Life insurance fraud is just one of the countless scams that have rippled through the district of Barpeta in northeast India. Two years ago thousands of people began bribing community banks to add their names to a cash aid program meant for farmers. It was a scholarship scandal before that. A Ponzi scheme made a killing before that. In this corner of the state of Assam, where Parbin and her family live, scam culture is so ingrained that some people take pride in the ingenuity of it all, joking about “brainpower.” Occasionally, though, they make subtle reference to what’s driving the scams: crushing poverty, government neglect, political oppression. Versions of this are unfolding all over India, where historically marginalized people are striking back at the state in the only ways available to them.