Bengaluru: Debt spiral, job loss and a chilling murder

Spiralling debt, joblessness and the fear of social stigma were principal motives that drove a woman techie to kill her mother and stab her younger brother last week, police said.

Amrita Chandrashekar, 33, had been struggling to repay Rs 15 lakh that she owed mostly to banks. While her father, who died in 2013, owed Rs 3 lakh, she took some more loans. Being the eldest child of her parents, she took the responsibility of repaying the debt. But repayment was easier said than done, and she could never come out of the debt spiral.

Things took a turn for the worse in 2017 when Amrita lost her job at an MNC in Bengaluru. As she defaulted on EMI payments, banks started sending her messages, threatening legal action. All this while, Amrita told her family that she had been dutifully repaying the loans.

Also Read: Woman techie neither cried nor slept after killing mother, stabbing brother: Police

But her mother, Nirmala, 54, somehow learnt about the unpaid loans. She was angry and asked Amrita for an explanation. A desperate Amrita then started looking up the internet to find a way out of the mess. By then, she was considering suicide.

A Google search showed her that if a borrower commits suicide, the loan would be transferred to her close relatives. In this case, her mother and brother would be liable. She then decided to kill both of them and commit suicide or just run away from the city. She looked up the internet again, this time for ways to kill a person.

Also Read: Techie who killed mother arrested in Port Blair

Things reached a head when some lenders allegedly threatened to come to the family’s house in Ramamurthy Nagar on February 2 for the loan recovery. Amrita decided to go ahead with the murder.

She stabbed her mother and brother in the early hours of that day and ran off with a male friend named Sridhar Rao, 28, to catch a 6.30 am flight to Port Blair. Rao and Amrita had worked at the MNC from 2014 and 2017. Amrita had decided to find another job and repay the loans. She thought her brother, Harish Chandrashekar, who earns Rs 35,000 a month, could also repay the loans.

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Bengaluru police arrested Amrita and Rao from Port Blair on February 5 and brought them to the city the next day. On Friday, the 29th ACMM court remanded them in judicial custody for 14 days.

M N Anucheth, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Whitefiled), said they had reasons to believe that Rao knew about Amrita’s plans. While it was Amrita who had booked the air tickets two days before the murder, she didn’t book the return tickets. “We suspect they had planned to go somewhere else from Andaman. Crucially, Amrita threw her phone in a gutter near Ramamurthy Nagar after the murder. If you are going on a trip with someone and that person throws his/her phone, you’d naturally ask why? Rao didn’t do that.”