At the hearing on 11.2.2014 a lot was made out of the fact that Sahara has been raising money in cash and one sided story has been presented yet. Sahara’s image and credibility has been severely affected where 12 lacs families earn their lively hood.
The fact is that most of our investors are small. In OFCD our average investment amount is Rs.8,000/-, around 98% investors are below 19,000/- and starts from Rs.500/-. Mostly these people do not go to Bank and banks also do not reach to them.
So these investors deposits in cash and essentially want to take back in cash.
Here it is very important, to understand, as per many global and country's institution's study that in India about only 50% population have access to Bank accounts.
Sahara India a Partnership Firm has infrastructure throughout the country with more than 4700 offices with lakhs of workers. Sahara was and is doing agency work/providing infrastructure services to Housing Finance, Mutual Benefit, Residuary Non Banking, OFC Debentures in 3 companies from 2001, Credit Co-operative Society and in non financial activities collects booking, then installments of Housing, Consumer Products etc. etc.
At our branches and service centre of Sahara India, right from the beginning the strict, convenient, safe, cost effective policy was adopted that is in one premises of “Sahara India” whatever money comes in a day from different constitution’s businesses should be first utilized for that day’s all payments including establishment expenses, secured loans, prematurities, maturities, redemption, etc and it is settled constitution wise at head quarter level.
The above strict policy was, followed due to following reasons amongst others: a. We lost few lives of our workers who used to take money from branches to banks or from banks to branches (more dangerous in this situation). It happened hundreds of times where these workers faced snatching, robberies, few had died many had serious injuries and many more had minor injuries. Our workers always feel scared to take money to deposit into the bank or from bank to offices and it is definitely not possible cost wise to provide one-two gun mans at more than four thousands of branches.
b. If policy would have been to get all the collected money from branches to Head Quarter and then again sending back to the branches for payments it would cost us huge amount of bank charges and also loss of interest would have been very big amount and that too on continuous basis and again life risks etc. to take money from bank to office and very importantly our very, -very strict timely payments rule would have been effected.
About heavy payments in short period, SEBI does not want to understand the spread of our network into 4700 centers. If carefully calculated it will be found branch average payments per day is around 2.5 Lakhs.
SEBI has repaid around Rs.70 Lakhs in last 17 months out of 5120 Crores deposited to SEBI by us. SEBI totally ignored Hon'ble Courts order and has not initiated one verification out of 3 Crore investors in last 17 months and last few months totally avoiding to report the valuation of our assets submitted to them. We are very happy Hon'ble Court has ordered them this time to come out with the valuation report.
To know more please visit http://www.sahara.in/index.html
