THE CRAPBOOK

This time it was him against State Bank of Travancore.

He had loan with the bank and the manager has promised him that he would have the flexibility of withdrawing from the loan account any time he wanted. 

 He withdraw-ed money only as and when he wanted. After two weeks the manger quit and the new person refused to dispense anymore cash from the account. He said that this is not allowed and all the blah blahs.My dad being a Manager in finance with a reputed tyre manufacturing company in India knew all the dos and don’ts in banking (My Daddy strongest!). He decided to write a complaint to the SBT head office. He didn’t get any reply. This forced him to sue SBT !!.

In a chain of events, the manager of SBT came to our house with a union leader to negotiate. There were calls from the head office to take matters out of the court. He was not ready for any negotiation.

He won the case. The court asked to pay Rs  4000/- as compensation.

You can find Part I here.

Browsing through a couple of blogs today and I found an interesting one. This was about consumer protection. This reminds me of the consumer cases my dad has filed against State Bank of Travancore and The KSEB (Kerala State Electricity Board). 

My dad can’t take it when it comes to poor customer service. (My daddy strongest!!!) ) Back home we used to have frequent power cuts (power supply wouldn’t be there for days) and when there is supply there would be voltage fluctuations (thanks to a stone crushing factory close to my home). 

 My computer UPS was down in 2 weeks. All the light bulbs had to be changed every three days. The KSEB was supplying power to around ten houses and the small factory all from the same transformer and power line. This is against the rules and regulations because they are supposed to provide separate power lines for the factory. My dad approached the KSEB office a number of times, but each time he was turned down.

 He filed a case with the consumer court. On the day before the second hearing of the case, I could see some activity outside my home. There were workers digging, some fixing a new…..transformer. In five hours they were done. Now there was no more voltage fluctuations. 

The next day, KSEB pleaded that they had fixed a transformer even before the case was registered and the case was void. This pissed off our advocate.( we dint get enough time to advice our advocate on the new developments). Our advocate wanted to pursue the case further. But then my dad thought otherwise, he didn’t want to pursue the case further.  

“But we can win” I said  ”We can easily prove that they installed the transformer yesterday!!”

 “I just wanted to know how many people (and how much time) it takes to fix a transformer. If we give them the right direction these people are really efficient” He said with a smile.

 You can find part II here.