CONSUMER RIGHTS
Hard to bank on
Pushpa Girimaji

IF you want to know the kind of problems that consumers face vis-`E0-vis banks, all you need to do is to look at the cases filed by them before courts. There have been, for example, cases of fraudulent or illegal withdrawal of money from bank accounts; cases of valuables disappearing from lockers; and in one particular case termites destroying cash and valuable papers kept in the locker of a client. There have also been cases of ATMs not releasing the cash, but passbooks showing withdrawal of money from the ATMs.

Another area where banks have come under attack pertains to the safety (or lack of it) of valuable papers—original sale deeds of property—and also gold pledged with them. There have also been cases of cheques deposited in ‘drop boxes’ getting lost; of banks making mistakes in the statement of accounts and then penalising the customer for it.

Banks have also been held guilty of ‘forgetting’ to pay premium on motor vehicle insurance policies despite having taken the money towards it. Banks have also come under fire for failing to provide adequate safety to depositors at bank premises.

Another area of concern is credit. Courts have taken banks to task for the inordinate delay in releasing sanctioned loans, and more recently, for withholding credit sanctioned under the Pradhan Mantri Rozgar Yojana to unemployed youth without justification. In recent months, I have also written about cases where banks had dishonoured cheques of depositors on grounds of ‘insufficient’ funds in the account despite facts to the contrary.

In all these cases, banks are unwilling to accept responsibility for the deficient service rendered by them and make amends. As a consequence, consumers are forced to seek the intervention of courts which, in most cases, do not disappoint them.

Now here is another case where the cash deposited by a customer was not credited to her account at all, and the bank refused to correct the mistake even after several letters on the issue. The consumer in this case, Pooja Joshi, had three accounts with Vijaya Bank in Bandra west, Mumbai. One was a savings account, the other two were current accounts.

In June, 1997, she went to the bank to deposit Rs 5 lakh in cash. Apparently, the cashier was not at the counter. So Joshi handed over the cash to the chief manager and got on the counterfoil of the pay-in slip, his signature and also the seal of the bank. She obviously had no reason to suspect any foul play, and so did not even check her account to see whether the money had been credited to her account. However, in August, while checking her account for the purpose of income tax, her chartered accountant noticed that the money had not been credited to her account. Immediately, Joshi brought this to the notice of the bank and asked it to credit the amount. When the bank refused to comply, she filed a complaint before the state consumer disputes redressal commission, which asked the bank to credit the amount to her account, along with 7.5 per cent interest, and also pay Rs 1 lakh as compensation. Challenging this order before the apex court, the bank argued that the counterfoil referred to by the client pertained to some other transaction and not the cash transaction that she was referring to. Dismissing the contention of the bank, the court pointed out that the bank had not submitted the affidavit of the then chief manager, who had signed the counterfoil, but had submitted that of an assistant manager of the bank, who had no knowledge of the case.

The bank had not even provided the affidavit of the cashier, even though it argued that the cashier was present that particular day. In other words, the bank had failed to prove that it had not received the cash of Rs 5 lakh, while the customer had shown that she had indeed deposited the money and taken the signature of the chief manager.

The bank also argued that the case, filed in 2000, was time-barred as the Consumer Protection Act puts a time limit of two years for filing a complaint. Dismissing such a contention, the court pointed out that the complaint was well within the time limit as the calculation of time began from the time the bank repudiated her complaint.

Thus, upholding the order of the lower court, the new president of the national consumer disputes redressal commission, Justice Ashok Bhan, in his order directed the bank to pay in addition, Rs 20,000 as costs to the consumer. (Vijaya Bank v. Pooja G.Joshi, FA no 801 of 2003).

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