Woman living reclusive, bedridden life in Mohali
Gaurav Kanthwal
Mohali, February 18
An 80-year-old bedridden widow of an Army Havildar got her family pension last week, for the first time, around 17 years after the death of her husband.
In the twilight years of her life, Ranjit Kaur, a resident of Phase 2, will get around Rs 18 lakh as arrear with effect from 2007, regular pension of Rs 16,000 per month and medical, CSD and other facilities the family of an ex-servicemen is entitled to.
Ranjit Kaur was married to Prem Singh Puri, a resident of Panjkoha village in Morinda of Ropar district, and employed as a Havildar in the Corps of Signals. The couple had a daughter Surinder Kaur. The couple’s relationship soured after few years of marriage following which Ranjit Kaur and her daughter came to her parents’ house in Mohali in 1973.
The woman’s parents died in 2006, leaving behind a one-room set where the mother-daughter started living. They had no contact with Puri who sold all his property and started remaining incommunicado. He died a death of obscurity in 2006 with little contact in his village.
His widow now lives a reclusive, bedridden life with her 51-year-old daughter.
“Ranjit Kaur is bedridden, with very little senses. During documentation, the bankers refused to identify her due to her frail condition. It was a long struggle. There was so much bitterness between the couple that Ranjit never tried to get in touch with her husband. She did not even know that her husband had died 14 years ago. It was her daughter, who is unmarried and dependent on her, came to us,” said Lt Col SS Sohi (retd). He and his team run an NGO, Ex-servicemen Grievances Cell, and did the legwork since August 2021 to get her right.
When her case was put forward to the Army authorities in 2021 by sainik welfare , they checked the records and found that indeed no one had claimed family pension for Puri. The biggest hurdle in getting the family pension was that the applicants did not even have the service number of the Armyman and no one in the village had any clue about him.
“Most of the time, we kept searching for his ‘kala baksaa’ (trunk to keep soldiers belonging) in the village, which has the service number written on it. But we did not get it. Finally, we bumped into one of Puri’s acquaintances who had a packet of documents, including his death certificate, after which the process for family pension took off,” said the 78-year-old veteran.