This was an incident that made me feel that there are places that care about customers. The spouse and me had gone to the Pacific Mall in East Delhi for dinner. Apparently at that time, the spouse dropped a wallet over there containing some cash, credit cards and some money. This miss was not discovered until the next day when she realized that her wallet was missing.
Lot of hue and cry, but in the end, we decided that the mall (actually the food court in the mall) was the likely place where the wallet was dropped, and she decided that she would go there and check it out. So she went to the food court in the mall, and when she explained the situation, it was very gratifying to hear their reply.
They have a process to deal with customer lost and found, and the previous evening, one of the staff over there had found the wallet and turned it in, and so, after a few queries, they handed the wallet over to here. Apparently this has happened a number of times, and in fact, if they are not able to return items, it was because other patrons would have found the item and pocketed it. It felt good to see a place caring about its customers after the customer has actually left.

Thank god for choice. I was looking to buy a ticket on Deccan Airlines for a return flight from Delhi to Calcutta. I looked around at the airlines, and for the ones who flew on this route, Deccan was offering the best deal. However, Deccan’s reputation is not very good, and hence I was somewhat apprehensive. I need not have bothered.
Deccan has essentially either a web based or phone based method to buy tickets. On the website, they mention that they have had an excellent response to their offer, and hence the web site may have performance issues. Okay, so let’s still try it out.
It didn’t connect the first time when I tried to click on the route planning part, and on refresh it worked. Next, when I entered details, search returned an ‘XML’ error. I tried again after some time, and lo and behold, I was taken to a site where I could enter credit card details and fill in passenger details. I did all that, and then horrors, the page hung while trying to process, and remained like that for around 25 minutes, after which it returned an error.
Now I was not sure as to what had happened. My credit card details had been provided, but there was no clear guarantee that the transaction had either gone ahead or not. I checked email and phone, and no information from Deccan. So I tried calling up their numbers, but, and this is to expected, the number was always busy. So now, I don’t know whether the ticket was bought or not. You can be sure that the next time I will think twice before trying for Air Deccan.

So the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is looking after customers after all. One of the biggest problems faced by mobile users in India right now is the number of calls they get from direct marketers on behalf of banks and other financial instruments. These could be in the nature of loan requests, credit card requests, insurance, and others. Most customers find these calls extemely irritating and keep on getting frustated because they do not see a solution. In addition, they really suffer if they are roaming nationally or internationally and have to suffer roaming charges for these junk calls.
In proposed guidelines, the TRAI proposes to ban banks from using the services of direct sales agents for selling their financial products. Refer this article:

Unsolicited telemarketing calls may soon become history. Under new guidelines on unsolicited commercial calls, telecom regulatory authority of India (TRAI) proposes to forbid banks from using the services of direct sales agents for marketing financial tools. Banking industry accounts for about 90 per cent of the unsolicited calls, according to TRAI estimates. There are about 30,000 direct sales agents appointed by banks and they are not covered by any rules and regulations as they do not have a licence from any government authority.
The new guidelines that regulators would propose this week would make it mandatory for all the banks to use the services of other service providers (OSPs), who are licensed entities and work under the guidelines formulated by the department of telecommunications (DoT).

This is really welcome news for customers. In addition, TRAI envisages maintaining a national Do not Call Registry, and subscribers can register themselves with this DNC registry. All banks and their agents would have to respect the names of people in this registry, and banks would be charged penalties if they violate these rules. This would make India equal to other countries in terms of customer protection, and should bring a sense of relief to customers. In addition, TRAI wants mobile operators to disconnect those subscribers who make unsolicited calls.

It was decided that the floor in the house courtyard was in a bad state, and it was time to repair it. The idea was to use black granite for the new work, and this entailed breaking up the currently installed floor and install a new floor altogther. So things started proceeding as per plan. A contractor was hired, and the first task was to clear the courtyard of everything lying on it; all the pots had to be moved elsewhere, and a cooler had to be displaced.
Next, for 2-3 days, the labour proceeded to break the floor. Next, the actual stone has to be bought. There is a big construction market located at Jagatpuri in East Delhi. So stone was bought from there in a visit. This is where the detail starts getting interesting. We started loading the stones in shifts, and the first shift was selected by us, and the stone was all perfect. The idea was that stones would get loaded even after we left with the same quality. Bad idea. After we left, the stones that we started getting a rejection rate of around 30%. Had to go back there and get stones loaded afresh. Gave me a good education about buying such things.

The RTI Act promised to be a major step in enhancing the easy availability of getting information from the Government and as a by-product, to help in the reduction of corruption. This objective is sometimes achieved, but mostly not. The Act is only as important as the people willing to make an effort to get the required result.
In a case in Chandigarh, the Central Information Commission has imposed the maximum penalty of Rs. 25,000 on the Director of Estates, Chandigarh, for providing “irrelevant” information on an RTI application.
A resident of Chandigarh had filed an RTI application with the Estate Office, Chandigarh on October 25 last year seeking certain information pertaining to coaching centres and schools being run in the residential area there. After not getting the required information, he filed a reminder. On not getting the information even after that, he filed his appeal with the RTI enforcing body, the Central Information Commission.
The body finally replied back, but the CIC deemed the information provided as insufficient, and together with the delay, fined the maximum amount of Rs. 25,000. A good thing overall, if an Indian government functionary refused to release information, then they are liable for fines under the law. Refer the relevant Times of India article.
We need more cases like these to be filed under RTI. This spreads awareness among the population about the usage of such strong laws, and with more judgements such as these, the officials will also feel the effect of refusing to disclose the required information.