This scenario is one of the biggest fears that people have when dealing with credit cards, and handing this information off to other parties. You hand this off to a person purporting to come from a bank, and then find that charges are being piled on your credit card, and then have to run around in trying to clear yourself of these extra charges. It can get real frustrating and annoying for people to have to deal with such kind of problems. The normal tendency is to blame the bank for keeping such people on their rolls, for having such a process where misuse can happen, and for then being insensitive to the problems they are facing. Read more about the incident:

The manager of a Delhi-based private firm was arrested along with two accomplices on Friday on charges of allegedly making purchases using the credit card of an ICICI bank customer.
“We registered a case on the complaint of Atri and arrested Goyal from the Rohini branch of ICICI Bank. The other two were arrested at the instance of Goyal. During interrogation it was revealed that Goyal is the manager of i-process, an outsourcing private company of ICICI Bank, dealing with credit card users whereas accused Ashish Katyan and Dev Aggarwal were working as recovery agents in another collection agency,” said DCP (outer) Atul Katiyar. “The accused used to contact the customers and introduce themselves using a fake name. Then they used to send Ashish Katyan for collecting the card from consumers. Instead of blocking the cards, the three used to go shopping.

The basis for the information that these thieves come up with is information that the bank has revealed to them, so the bank should be the one to blame for this. In the process of reducing their costs by outsourcing this service, they have let such a thing happen, and hence need to be penalized. If this was a country with stronger implementation of privacy and data theft laws, the bank would be in serious trouble.

Today’s world is a world of speed. If you remember previous times, in case of a medical problem, you would go to a hospital and give your samples over there for check-up; and you would get your results later (maybe the next day, but mostly after a few days). However, as medical science improved, the area of providing quality medical diagnosis based on samples (blood, fluids, stool, etc) improved, with results coming in much faster than previously. In addition, modern collection companies such as Dr. Lal Pathlabs, and the Ranbaxy SRL Labs are now spread all over major cities, decentralizing the collection facilities by spreading them ever few kilometers, with the quality of results of these tests also being of good quality. However, as the incidence of testing by specialist sample testing companies grows, our dependence on them also grows, and they increasing start entering the realm of consumer complaints and dissatisfaction:

NEW DELHI: The state consumer commission has pulled up a speciality laboratory for inordinate delay in sending a patient’s report to a hospital, as a result of which he died. The lab report for a CMV test — carried out for viral detection — was crucial for the treatment of a 56-year-old patient, who was awaiting a renal transplantation. It took the laboratory 25 days to send the report, by which time the patient died. Now, the commission has asked the lab, Speciality Ranbaxy Limited, to pay Rs 50,000 as compensation to the victim’s family.

Once companies enter life-critical areas, then they need to be clear that they can literally be responsible for life and death decisions; and accordingly need to be prepared for adverse customer reactions if their responses are not upto the desired quality levels.

Citizens of the country have mostly bad thoughts about interacting with Government bodies; a lot of them come across officialdom who are not responsive and caring about their needs (as an example, making them come repeatedly even for small errors in the red tape process), and so on. There are babus (officials), who are friendly, but most are like hard faced officials, unwilling to come across as caring people. It would be nice for people to live in a gated community (and self-sufficient place) where one would not have to interact with the Government bureaucracy, but that is living in an ideal world. However, there are cases when official responses are such that you would be horrified to read about such cases, and wonder as to how the official structure of the country could be so insensitive to the problems faced by citizens, that too when the situation is due to a fault of the agency themselves. The Delhi Development Authority however has been roundly criticized from time to time over its openness, caring nature (lack of it), and inability to care about what citizens go through. Read this article for more information:

Wondering if DDA derives “some kind of sadistic pleasure” in harassing citizens, Delhi High Court has slammed the civic agency in a case of double allotment of a flat in 1991 due to which the rightful owner was deprived of its possession and had to wage a 17 year legal battle in court.
“Ignoring dictum of law the officials of DDA keep perpetuating their illegal acts giving an impression as if they derive some kind of sadistic pleasure to harass the citizens,” HC observed while castigating the civic body for having the nerve to demand double the price of a flat which wasn’t handed over to Gandhi in 1991 because of DDA’s double allotment mistake.

This case really highlights as to how uncaring an agency can be. DDA double-allotted a flat in 1991, and when the lady in question tried to get the mistake corrected, the DDA did a fresh allotment to her after 10 years and charged her new prices, at double the original cost. In such cases, the Court should also assign individual responsibility and fine officials responsible (including fining officials of the rank of Chairman and Vice-Chairman if they had made such recommendations).

It seems to be a story that keeps on repeating itself over and over; you hear of people being harassed by loan recovery agents for repayment of loans, or of somebody’s vehicle being taken away from them anywhere where the vehicle can be found, and so on. In extreme cases, the pressure or violence of the recovery agents can lead to injury or death of the person having taken the loan. The financing company or bank having advanced the loan would take recourse to goons or musclemen and they would use or threaten force in this regard.
For the last 2-3 years, this practise has been challenged in court, and there have been a number of decisions in this regard. Here’s another substantiating the same point that a loan recovery company cannot use force for loan recovery. Since a loan agreement is a civil contract, recovery of loan amount or the assets bought against the loan also can happen only when there is a court order:

Unless a bank or a financial institution is equipped with a court order to repossess a vehicle which it has given on loan, it has no authority to go to the residence of the borrower to take away the vehicle by force. This was observed by the state consumer commission in a recent order.
Taking strong exception to the method adopted by a finance firm to recover dues in the form of a few unpaid instalments from a consumer who took the money to purchase a vehicle, the commission headed by Justice J D Kapoor directed Citicorp Finance (I) Limited to pay Rs 50,000 to one Jan Mohammad, a resident of Mehrauli, for the mental agony, harassment and public humiliation he faced. It was observed by the commission that no financier or bank had the authority to forcibly take possession of the vehicle as the loan agreement or hire purchase agreement were civil contracts and therefore had to be enforced through civil remedy. In other words, through intervention of the court.

It may be argued that the judicial system in India is slow and cases take a long time to settle; however that cannot be an argument for using force or illegal means. A company needs to act in the constraint of the law, so they need to use greater discretion when deciding loans, or they need to go in for more out-of-court settlements in such cases.

Citizens having to deal with the Government normally complain most about the myriad forms, the determined blocking nature of the bureaucracy, as well as the amount of corruption involved even to clear matters that should normally get cleared easily. The RTI Act was a good step in that direction, but there is still lots of improvement pending. One of the initiatives by the Delhi Government in this direction is the establishment of a website where citizens can log issues related to grievance with works of the Delhi Government. There is some amount of cynicism about whether this is related to the forthcoming elections, but if this becomes a success and the grievances of people are resolved, then it would be a great thing.

The website is http://www.155345.in/ (AAP KI SUNWAI).

The list of departments that can be reached with this grievance website is a comprehensive list:

A And U Tibbia College
Account Department NDMC
Accounts MCD
Acharya Shri Bhikshu Govt. Hospital
Administrative Reforms
Advertisement MCD
Agricultural Marketing Directorate
Agriculture Mkt. Board of Delhi

Read more…