A Nepean Sea Road resident has some reason to cheer five years after his ancestral home in Srinagar was damaged in a terrorist attack. The South Mumbai District Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum has awarded him Rs 5 lakh as compensation after an insurance firm left him in the lurch by rejecting his claim . The forum also took the firm to task for unilaterally deleting the “terrorism clause” from 66-year-old Sudhir Anant’s policy that covered the complainant’s Srinagar bungalow.
Anant, who originally hails from Kashmir, bought a policy from The New India Assurance Company, in 2000. The policy included the “terrorism clause”. According to Anant, owing to the volatile situation in J&K, he had taken such a policy and in 2003-04 paid an additional premium to get the special clause included. On May 11, 2005, while Anant was in Mumbai, there was a blast on the street adjacent to the bungalow which damaged the structure considerably.

The insurance company used the claim from an earlier Supreme Court judgment that had ruled that a renewed policy is the same as the original policy, and conditions cannot be changed by the insurance company unilaterally.

NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court has awarded Rs 11 lakh as compensation to a man who was crippled for life while admitted at Batra Hospital in the city more than two decades ago.
The very night his sister who was at the hopital to take care of him noticed he was missing from his bed. She raised an alarm and the security guard, after a brief search, found Majumdar lying on the ground floor. The patient suffered multiple fractures and was reduced to a paraplegic. In his suit, Majumdar alleged the hospital had failed to take reasonable care of him and it was the hospital’s negligence that led to him getting such severe injuries.

Undoubtedly, SEBI has done a lot to protect the interest of investors. There are, however, some areas where action needs to be initiated to ensure that investors, particularly small gullible ones, are protected from unscrupulous promoters, conniving auditors and mercenary manipulators.
The limited punitive actions taken by the department of corporate affairs and SEBI against the companies and their directors do not answer the basic question of compensating the investors who for no rhyme or reason are the losers. The argument that investment in equities is a matter of risk and reward cannot be extended to the frauds committed by these companies. Small investors, at least up to Rs 25,000, need to be compensated.

Holding two car dealers guilty of unfair trade practice, the district consumer forum has directed them to pay a compensation of Rs 25,000 along with litigation cost of Rs 5,000 to sector-38 resident Manjit Singh. The forum headed by Jagroop Singh Mahal directed Prithi Pal Singh and Sukhwinder Singh, dealers of second-hand vehicles in Car Bazaar, to return Rs 1,20,000 with interest to Manjit for not providing him necessary documents of a car purchased from them.
Despite repeated requests, nothing was done in this regard which forced Manjit to report the matter to the police. Later, the complainant approached the Registering and Licensing Authority, Haryana, and was shocked to learn that the vehicle was under the process of transfer in the name of one Mahesh Kumar of sector 40-D, Chandigarh. Following this, Manjit filed a complaint before the forum alleging cheating, fraud, deficiency in service and unfair trade practice.

In A bid to ensure that fewer policies get lapsed, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Irda) has made it tougher for agents to shift loyalties . The new agency guidelines ensure that all agents—individuals , corporate as well as banks—continue to sell policies of the same insurance company for at least three years. Historically, lapse ratio has been higher among orphan policies when compared with policies that are serviced by an agent. To ensure that an agent shifting loyalties does not leave behind orphan policies, the insurance regulator has put in a number of preconditions that the agent has to fulfil before he can obtain a no-objection certificate from his principal.
To take care of the policies orphaned by agents, Irda said, life insurers should ensure alternate arrangement, and these measures should go beyond a call centre facility, which is also an essential requirement . Insurance companies have been asked to intimate each policyholder that their agent has quit and there are alternate arrangements being made to service them.

Imposing a penalty of Rs one lakh, which the bank will pay to Goyal, the forum said, ‘The bank is directed to overhaul accounts of all its loanees and bring the rate of interest at par with those at which the loan (home) is advanced to new customers from time to time, so that all its customers, whether old or new, who have opted for adjustable rate of interest pay the same rate of interest during any particular period.’
Arguing before the forum, Goyal’s counsel stated that the finance company and bank adopted unfair trade practice by increasing rate of interest for old customers at a higher rate, whereas the prevailing rate of interest was much lower, which was depicted through their announcements and advertisements in the newspaper to attract new customers. After hearing the pleas, the forum held that the interest rate of any old loanee would be lowered to bring it at par with the interest rate at which the loan is advanced by the bank to its new customers.

One is not sure whether this practice is still ongoing, but one suspects that banks do continue doing this. Not too many people are aware that this has been ruled unfair by a consumer forum, and that they can challenge this practice. Most people continue to accept that whatever a bank does is acceptable.

NEW DELHI: The National Consumer Commission has held the DDA guilty of causing mental agony to a woman who was not handed over possession of a flat for nine years and asked it to pay Rs 50,000 as compensation. The Commission, comprising Justice R C Jain and member Anupam Dasgupta, also asked the housing agency to pay interest to allottee Prabhati at the rate of 15% on Rs 8.59 lakh for the period between 1998 to 2005.
“In the facts and circumstances of the case, we hold that the delays in issuing the letter of possession of the flat and in delivering its possession are instances of gross misfeasance in the DDA,” the Commission said, adding that it was an “inexplicable and deliberate” delay by the authority. The panel passed the order on DDA’s plea challenging the Delhi Consumer Commission’s direction to it, asking the agency to pay the allottee Rs 50,000 compensation and Rs 2,500 cost.

This is not the first time such a judgment has been passed on the DDA, which has been held guilty in many previous such cases of causing agony to people who have been successful in winning flats, and then being forced to wait for long periods before getting possession. And yet a systematic cleanup of the DDA does not seem like a possibility, given the vested interests involved.

CHANDIGARH: Finding Reliance Communication deficient in services, UT consumer forum directed it to pay Rs 10,000 as compensation for harassment along with Rs 2,500 as litigation costs to Tejbir Kaur of Sector 46. The forum also added that Reliance was duty bound to adjust Rs 9,345 and Rs 330 received by it.
According to the complaint, Kaur had purchased internet connection for a year from Reliance for Rs 9,375, but after two months she allegedly found out that hers was an old connection because of which it terminated. She was then reportedly given a new number with the assurance that the amount already paid by her would be transferred into the new account. She, however, alleged that it was not done, rather she received legal notices for non-payment of bills.

Typically, at such times, the company officials should respond in such a way that benefits the customer, but it did not seem to happen. This case is another example of how it is to the benefit of consumers of being more aware of their rights, and how when companies are not ready to improve their services, consumers can go to consumer forums for getting justice.