Consumer Rights

Airlines charge extra to keep up with agents

ashish — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:42:06 +0000

For some time now, the airline ticket booking business in India has going through turmoil. As airlines are facing a tough time financially, they have told agents that tickets booked by agents will no longer get commission to the agents. The way that the business used to go was, when a ticket was booked by an agent for an airline, the agent used to get a commission for the booking, approx Rs. 350 to Rs. 500. But with the decision to do away with the commissions, airlines faced a revolt from these agents who threatened to boycott them. Having said that, consumers should have benefited from this decision, since the fee should now be deducted from the airline tickets. However, in an unprecedented action, airlines are still charging consumers the same amount, apparently under pressure from agents who don’t want airlines to start selling at a reduced rate, even if the tickets are being sold directly:

Aviation fuel may have got cheaper on Saturday, but flying has become much more expensive. India’s three full service airlines — AI, Jet and Kingfisher — started levying a transaction surcharge on tickets sold by them. This surcharge is exactly similar to the fee that agents now charge — Rs 350 and Rs 500 for economy and business-class domestic flights and between Rs 1,200 to Rs 10,000 for international ones.
This means that there’s no escaping this additional charge whether people buy tickets from agents who moved over to the new system after airlines stopped paying them any commission from Saturday, or directly from the carriers. A senior airline official claimed that this was done under pressure from travel agents. “Agents told us that if we sell tickets cheaper than them, agencies would find it hard to get business. So we had no option as 85% of all tickets are sold by agents and they have threatened to boycott the three biggest Indian airlines,” the official said, clearly happy that airlines will pocket this entire amount.

This is an act that is vehemently anti-customer. If the airlines are having a commercial dispute with their agents, why should the customer have to pay extra; the airline is happy since it gets additional payment. The agent is happy since there is no under-cutting of their business and customers don’t feel any difference between buying the ticket from the airline and from the agent.

Making municipal services pay for negligence

ashish — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:45:23 +0000

One of the biggest issues we face in our cities as to today is the problem with regard to our sorry state of municipal services. The level of services varies from city to city, but some of the biggest problems that people currently face are examples of sorry state of sewage and cleanliness, poor condition of roads and streets, inadequate sanitation and garbage collection, poor upkeep of our current infra-structure. These problems can be attributed to bad governance, bad leadership, corruption and sheer laziness. Many times, citizens suffer because of this, and because of lack of responsibility, are unable to do much about this poor condition of municipal services. However, the courts are always a way to get justice, even if it takes a decade to do this:

CHENNAI: The Madras high court has directed the Chennai Corporation to pay compensation of Rs 1 lakh to the parents of a child, who drowned in a storm water drain negligently left open by sanitation workers. Pointing out that the 18-month-old Venugopal died over 10 years ago, Justice Chandru decried the Chennai Corporation for having failed to submit its reply to the court in a timely manner.
He directed the civic body to pay the compensation amount to the child’s parents within four weeks, and warned that any failure in this regard would be viewed seriously by the court. “Insofar as the death of Venugopal, the Chennai Corporation is squarely responsible. Because of their negligence in not keeping the storm water drainage in closed condition, such an incident had happened. The minor Venugopal cannot be expected to know the danger of the stormwater drainage kept in an open condition,” he said.

In this case, the drain was kept open while cleaning was happening. This is negligence, since as the court pointed out, it is not expected that children will have the same sense of danger. Keeping a drain open like this was hence very dangerous.

Hospital fined for improper diagnosis

ashish — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:35:15 +0000

Modern medical care can be very expensive. We have managed to push the boundaries of medical care much further in the recent years, and are able to diagnose diseases much better than just a couple of decades ago. As a part of this, we have much better equipment, much better diagnostic techniques, and a much higher level of specialization of the medical sciences. However, one direct result of this is that a lot of medical treatment has got more expensive; this is compounded by the fact that medical services are now increasingly privatized with the providing of medical services becoming a for-profit business. Along with these higher fees comes additional responsibility for these services, and also sees more patients hauling up these medical services for compensation if the treatment has not been correct:

NEW DELHI: A Delhi court on Saturday directed Max Hospital to pay a compensation of Rs.150,000 to a patient for not properly diagnosing him as a result of which he had to be shifted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Delhi State Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission headed by Justice J.D. Kapoor observed that according to medical literature, sodium level below 120 mg per litre is dangerous and injection Lasix should not be given at all.
The doctor, who administered the injection, was negligent for not monitoring it before giving the injection, the commission said

In many advanced countries, this is the norm. Hospitals and doctors have to be responsible for the treatment they give. Sometimes, informally hospitals and doctors do advance an argument that with the large number of patients they treat, such mistakes can happen. This is not a permissible argument. When a patient has paid the complete amount required, a patient deserves the best treatment, and it is contingent on the hospital to provide the same.

Delays in getting marksheet leads to compensation

ashish — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:11 +0000

In an order than held that an educational institution, if it provides education or holds examinations, provides a service that is covered under the Consumer Protection Act, the Lucknow Consumer Redressal Forum awarded a sum of Rs. 20 lakhs to a student whose examination results were not provided to him for a long period, and hence compensation was awarded to the sum of this amount of ruining his career, and for litigation costs. This was a complicated where a court case was needed to get the result finally declared, after which the student went to consumer court for getting compensation for time lost and damage to his career. The consumer forum also over-ruled the position of the educational bodies that the consumer court did not hold jurisdiction over them:

LUCKNOW: The State Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, Lucknow, has awarded a compensation of Rs 20 lakh to a student who waited for five and half years to obtain his marksheet for a back-paper examination which he undertook in 1999. The commission also held that an educational institution, while imparting education/or holding examination, does render a service as defined in the Consumer Protection Act. It was after repeated requests and written representations could not evoke action on the part of the opposite parties that he filed a writ petition in the high court.
The high court issued an order on May 24, 2004, directing the opposite parties to declare the result of the complainant. But, the order was taken lightly by the opposite parties and complainant, therefore, filed a contempt petition. However, the same was dismissed by the court because in the meantime the complainant’s back-paper result was declared (on April 11, 2004). The complainant then approached the commission. The commission, however, observed that inordinate delay in declaring the result has not only completely blocked but ruined the career of the complainant. It ruled that the case is of deficiency in service and rejected the contention of the opposite parties that the complainant is neither a consumer nor they (opposite parties) are rendering to him any service.

For many years now, there are many sections of society who claim to be serving interests of society, and not provide a consumer service. Medical services are one of them, and so are educational institutions, who take on the mantle of providing a higher service of education. However, in their conduct, they are nowhere near being of high morality, with their behavior being commercial. In such cases, it is eminently justifiable to hold them up for not acting in the interests of the student.

Getting compensation from airline for delayed landing

ashish — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:19:38 +0000

This is a consumer court judgment that will surely be appealed. Imagine the world of a person whose father died in a separate city (home town), and he had to rush home through connecting flights. And then the flight got delayed in landing, which means that the connecting flight was missed. He could not afford to miss the funeral, so he had to hire a taxi to rush home, costing him an additional Rs. 3500 for the taxi. Once he had completed the necessary formalities at the funeral, he wanted to know as to why the flight was late, especially when he was earlier assured that he would get the connecting flight:

Landing later than the scheduled time at Delhi airport has cost dear to Jet Lite. UT consumer forum directed the airlines to pay Rs 5,000 as compensation to Dr Mahesh Hukmani of Sector 19, who missed his connecting flight to Jaipur. He was to attend his father’s funeral in Jaipur on February 4, 2008.
Claiming that due to delay he had to hire a taxi for Rs 3,500 to reach Jaipur, Hukmani moved city’s consumer court. He added that on his return, when he contacted Jet Lite officials, they failed to give any satisfactory reply. Jet Lite in its reply pleaded that delay in departure occurred due to a technical snag, which was detected by the pilot, and in order to avoid any mishappening, the flight took around 40 minutes to remove the snag.

The airline would surely appeal against this ruling, since multiple low cost airlines get delayed often for no apparent reason, and when you ask their staff, they are unable to give any convincing reasons. More people would use such a ruling to push for their claims.

DGCA to act tough on carriers unwilling to refund money

ashish — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:48:39 +0000

The whole concept of low-cost airlines in India demands a new form of business where costs are minimized. Hence, over the years, we have seen airlines which are no-frills (such as Deccan, Spicejet, Go, Indogo, etc), with no newspapers and magazines, where no food is served / food has to be bought, and so on. Such airlines have brought the total cost of travelling down tremendously, letting people travel by with cheap tickets rather than the very expensive tickets that had to be bought earlier from full-fare airlines such as Indian Airlines and Jet Airlines would be charging; these full fare airlines would provide a much better level of service, but would also charge a much higher fare, sometimes 3-4 times the fare charged by these low-cost airlines.
However, at the same time, some of the practices that they followed to save money were anti-customer. If a ticket was cancelled, they would not refund the whole amount, or in really bad cases, the airline would give a voucher to travel on a later date but would not actually give the money back; in some cases, the refund would take a really long to come through and only after much follow-up from the traveler. In order to change some of these practices, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has made it binding on airlines to refund the money and not follow a practise of proving a voucher instead. However, airlines have been loath to do, making the DGCA threaten to take action:

Some low cost carriers (LCC) follow a controversial policy of no refunds by insisting that those who cancel their tickets fly again within a certain period of time in lieu of the refund. The DGCA had some months back issued a rule that airlines must give the option of both a refund and future travel to those who cancel tickets in time.
But despite this legal requirement, some LCCs are still not refunding money and asking passengers to travel again within a cutoff period. “We have been receiving such complaints from the public. It’s our constitutional obligation to ensure that laid down rules and regulations are followed,” DGCA chief Kanu Gohain said. The agency is going to seek an explanation from defiant airlines this week by issuing notices to them and threatening stern action if they don’t start following the rule of refund.

Airlines have been protesting this rule, but the fact is that not allowing customers a refund when they have not availed of a service, and used a quite normal procedure of cancellation is a violation of customer service norms, and cannot be allowed just because it works in the airline’s favor. The DGCA should continue to enforce this rule, and customers, if presented a voucher by an airline rather than a refund should protest to the airline, and petition the DGCA, as well as consumer forums. They should also refuse to accept any such voucher, and point out to the airline that this matter will go to a consumer forum.

Another case, person gets bill for ‘ghost’ credit card

ashish — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:14:44 +0000

It happens again and again. A person either has not accepted the credit card that was provided to him even when he had not requested the credit card, or he was charged for some amount where he did not make the transactions. Mistakes can happen, even though in cases of a financial nature, one would expect a much greater deal of carefulness on the part of the bank. However, what really takes the cake is when the bank refuses to come clean, or behaves in a manner that is totally against accepted consumer service behavior:

Paresh Karia (30), the owner of Jeetendra General Store, a grocery shop near Sonapur Lane in Kurla (W), was in for a shock when he received an ABN Amro credit card statement for June showing Rs 44,900 as due. Karia claimed that he never received the credit card. Karia said he approached the bank several times, but they did not reply. The bank allegedly did not even respond to his advocates’ letters. According to him, the bank has even started sending notices and making calls. “In the last two months, I have received over 15 calls from the bank’s recovery department, threatening me and demanding repayment of the dues and the late fees.”
He said, “In April, one of the bank’s telemarketing executive called me, asking me to apply for the bank’s credit card. At first, I refused, but the executive kept calling me, after which, I took the card. In May, the executive took my signature on the form, and took documents like PAN card and my HSBC Bank statement.” After 15 days, Karia received a confirmation call from the bank to verify the documents. However, Karia refused to give the details on phone and asked the executive to come down to his shop. “The next day, I received a parcel from the bank,” said Karia.

From time to time, the RBI and various Consumer forums have asked banks and other financial institutions to behave, and many times charged penalties, but these incidents keep on happening. It will come to a time when courts will actually start hauling executives of the banks before the court, like a court almost did to the ICICI Chief.

ICICI ‘payable-at-par’ checks

ashish — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:22:07 +0000

This is about a seemingly big fraud that India’s largest private sector bank is playing on its customers, giving a designation for something, and then doing something that is directly opposite, just so that they can squeeze their customers even more.
I used to work in Chennai, and had an ICICI account over there (that was a salary account). Later, I used the same account for linking to the ICICIDirect stock trading facility. Some time later, I switched jobs and cities, and moved over to the capital city, Delhi. While migrating many of my details, I asked the local ICICI bank about what I should do about my existing account, and they informed me that I can use my account as is, except that checks that I issued would involve an additional charge because of the different city status. Okay, so I stopped using the ICICI Bank account for this purpose, and used my alternative salary account instead for check issual.
However, this always was a bit irritating since the stock trading account being ICICI meant that a lot of inflow and outflow would go through the ICICI account, and not being able to use the money for checks meant a small inconvenience. Imagine my pleasure some time later when I learned that ICICI Bank was now issuing payable-at-par checks. I started using these for regular transactions in Delhi, and imagine the shock when I saw a multi-city charge to my account. Upon asking ICICI Bank about this charge, guess what they told me about the ‘payable-at-par’ checks ?
“Multi-city cheque payment charge is a charge for clearing a payable-at-par cheque at an outstation location (i.e. outside your city).”
Further, this is their definition of what payable-at-par means:
“Please note that ‘Payable at par’ means a cheque is payable at any location in India.”
Very strange. So were they claiming that their earlier checks would not get paid if I gave them to somebody in Delhi ? I don’t see what benefit their customers are getting as per their definition of ‘payable-at-par’, it is only ICICI Bank that can claim that they are also issuing payable at par checks, and yet get away with charging a penalty to their users.
I tried using their complaint site at https://infinity.icicibank.co.in/salesEARWeb/web/rbi/jsp/index.jsp, but it built using Javascript, and the complaint option did not work (maybe they do not want to see complaints)

Scam by companies selling cheap travel packages

ashish — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:29:36 +0000

Recently, I got a call from my spouse about contact from a travel package company. A company called XS Travel Club had contacted my spouse with grand promises of a great package - for Rs. 5000, you get a 3-4 days 4 nights package at locations varying from Mussorie to Shimla to Goa to Bangkok. Sounds good, right ? But there was more. There was 10 complimentary beauty treatments from the various Delhi outlets of BodyCare (typically things such as facials, massages, hair treatment, etc). And there were 10 dining coupons from 5 restaurants in different places in Delhi. Since I had more experience in handling such kind of things, my wife gave my contact to these people, and they contacted me. I talked on the phone to them, asked about the holiday resorts (the names they took sounded good), and even the restaurants looked fine. So I asked them to come over to my office for showing me the package and taking the Rs. 5000 from me.
They were at my office the next day, and everything was there - the stay vouchers, the dining coupons, and the BodyCare coupons. So I started reading and discovered a few interesting things:
- There was a separate processing charge of Rs. 199 mentioned in the terms and conditions
- For every night, there was an additional charge of Rs. 399 to be paid
- Places like Manali / Mussorie / Shimla did not allow the coupons to be used during the following months (yes, you must have guessed by now - the summer months; so no using of these coupons between April and July)
- so, overall they were going to be charging me Rs. 1400 more if I used the travel package (which is almost 30% additional over the Rs. 5000 they wanted to charge initially)
When I spoke to the person who had contacted me, he spoke to his manager (and I could hear the conversation to some degree). In effect, his manager said that they should tell me to take my vacation in August, and not in summer.
By this time, I was not exactly a cool cucumber, and I gave a piece of my mind to the guy who had spoken to me. In effect, what he had done was deceitful since he had not told me these conditions, and since I had opened the fine print, I came to know, else I would not have known.
He assured me that they would not charge these Rs. 1400, and would change the not allowed period of the package to some other time, but when I asked him to make that in the written terms and conditions, he did not respond.
What could have gone wrong ? Learnings:
- If I had taken the coupons without checking, I would have been stuck with those conditions, and would have been cursing myself for not looking at this more carefully.
- If I take the person’s oral committment about getting the money and period waiver without getting that in a written form, it is not something that would have held up later. After all, the person whom I would have spoken to later may deny any suck knowledge and I would have been stuck.

Thus, be very watchful when you see such offers, and always take the time to do a study.

Recovery agents involved in fraud

ashish — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:48:10 +0000

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.