Thiruvananthapuram/Mumbai, Nov 12 (PTI): Amid woes of customers hit by cash crunch, three people have reportedly died while waiting in queue to exchange their currency notes.
An elderly man standing in queue collapsed and died, while another fell to his death while filling forms to deposit over Rs 5 lakh worth scrapped high denomination notes as banks in Kerala continued to witness huge surge of customers for the second day on Friday to exchange demonetised Rs 1000 and Rs 500 notes.
Police said 75-year-old Karthikeyan from Kumarapuram in Haripad in Alappuzha district was standing in a queue at a branch of the State Bank of Travancore, when he collapsed and died.
In the other incident, Unni (48), working as an overseer in the Kerala State Electricity Board fell to his death while he was filling the necessary forms to deposit Rs 5.50 lakh he had with him. Initial reports say it was an accident, police said.
Police said the man had taken the loan from his PF account and had come to deposit it in the bank when he fell from the second floor of the building, housing the bank. He had stood in the queue for some time, police said.
A case of unnatural death has been registered.
Unni had come to the bank yesterday also but was unable to deposit the amount due to the heavy rush.
Police patrolling is being done and beat marshals are deployed outside the banks and the ATM centres to avoid any untoward incident and control the crowd wherever necessary.
Elderly man dies in Mumbai
Police said that a 73-year-old man, waiting in queue to exchange his old currency notes, collapsed and died in suburban Mulund on Friday afternoon, the police said.
Vishwanath Vartak, a senior citizen, was standing in queue outside a branch of the State Bank of India in Navghar area of Mulund (East) to exchange his notes when he suddenly fell, they said.
As he fell, some people, who were also in the queue, rushed him to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead before admission, the police said adding that the body had been sent for postmortem.
The police also visited the spot where the elderly man collapsed.
According to initial reports, Vartak died of a heart attack, police said.
Following the government's decision to scrap the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, there has been a huge rush outside banks since Thursday and at ATMs on Friday as anxious people wanted to withdraw money to meet their daily expenses.
ATMs of various banks across the state failed to operate in the initial hours today causing much hardship to customers who had to rush to banks for exchanging the demonetised notes and depositing their money.
Despite various banks assuring people that ATMs, which had remained shut for two days, would begin functioning from today, only a few of them were open in the early hours, testing the patience of harried customers.
Unprecedented rush was witnessed at the ATMs which opened this morning. But within hours they went dry, following which customers were seen protesting at some places.