Shoudn’t punitive acts by the government be made more stringent so that it would be deterrant for recurrence of law breaking attempts?

Shoudn’t punitive acts by the government be made more stringent so that it would be deterrant for recurrence of law breaking attempts?

 

 This is the followup of my earlier post on BSNL CBI Campaigns on Anti Corruption Drive. I was just thinking a while back that what is causing so much of corruptions rampant in our country. Besides, the state administration taking efforts to eradicate the corruption, it seems to be prevalent so much and very much deep rooted. Also, if one flips the newspapers regarding the way government officials are treated for the negligence of duty or offence, the maximum punishment that they are meted out is Temporary Suspension or Transfer to a different place.

 

On the other hand, if it comes to private enterprises, punishments towards business conduct violation would be stringent, strict and in most cases go upto legal litigatory compensation from the offender upto and in most including termination of employment of the offender in the group company involved. The stringent punishment like that helps to instil a sense of fear in the minds of the employer to be loyal to the organization, honest in his deeds and friendly to the customer. But when it comes to government employment, the officers are really callous towards the rules and regulations because they know for sure, they are in ‘very safe hands’. Even if government is imposing a strict punishment on any offender, there comes politically-biased unions which save them rather unscrupulously. We are actually aware about the JACTO-GEO strikes in 2003. You can check out the post over here.

 

Also, very recently, the previous commissioners of police in Greater Chennai (Sekar, Radhakrishnan) were all just mute spectators in the Law College incident, which triggered so much hype across the media. We did discuss about this incident sometime back over here. I would say, the current indian police system needs a radical renaissance. At least in Chennai, after Lathika Charan and Vijaykumar (the Veerappan fame) the commissioners who have been taking charge are just dummy ones without much contributions to the civic life style protection of the people and/or adding any value to their positions. Would the state administration do something to remedy on the maladies?

 

Staggering list of political parties, sky-exploding list of cine star and celebrity fan clubs along with their massive membership base can really make a good community initiative

Staggering list of political parties, sky-exploding list of cine star and celebrity fan clubs along with their massive membership base can really make a good community initiative

 

Whenever there is a interview with the top brass of city corporation or police regarding the slowness of law and order protection operations or civic community development procedures, the standard response that they give is ‘Paucity of labor’. They normally get to lament almost immediately on the slightest provocation of the question that ‘We are running short of staff to delegate to all spheres and areas. We are working round the clock to serve the people’.

 

I used to wonder what it causes them to voice such a blatant white lie when we have other occurences in the same city wherein the same personnel who when associated with their parent political parties never fail to show a solidarity of their big bunch of loyal followers and in an earnest attempt to demonstrate their ‘arm-strength’. I did some quick research over the political parties of India. The Wiki Page over here has a good comprehensive collection of political parties that are functioning from India. Each party, for sure, has good presence and command in their own areas of operation. Also, if we take stock of cine actors/actresses, amongst the thousands of them, each of them have a good amount of followers who literally worship them. I can cite the example of Khushboo, who is seemed to have adored by her fans with a temple near Trichy. Check out the Wiki page of Khushboo over here.

 

My only view was even the administrators could develop a community-conscious rapport with the political parties and cine actors, their entire mob can be transitioned as a good productive workforce for a number of constructive activities towards the upliftment of the society and the nation. A few of them, which I could immediately, think of are here under:

 

1. Revamp and renaissance of the Friends of Police movement. This would complement the efforts of the cops who seemed to be having a shortage of labor in enforcing law and order in the nation.
2. City/Town beautification efforts
3. Quick relief disbursements

Readers: What do you feel? Do share your thoughts on this topic too…

 

The so-called state-of-the-art banking enterprises still clinging to obsolete technology (components)

The so-called state-of-the-art banking enterprises still clinging to obsolete technology (components)

 

I have been observing the tall claims of two private banking entrepreneurs in India (ICICI Bank and Citibank India) who seemed to having tall claims on the state of the art banking style but when closely analysed their internet banking modules suffers from serious flaws. I have personally reported them to their customer care which just ‘acknowledges’ the feedback but it had been more than twenty four months now (on the average) with no improvements on the horizon.

 

1. ICICI Bank Infinity Logout still uses defunct Web Browser object and gives Scripting Errors: When you are logged on to the Internet banking module of ICICI Bank (called Infinity) and after completing the transaction when you logout, you would for sure encounter weird scripting errors because of the now obsolete Web Browser control. You can see the following code in the view source of the page which reveals the bad programming practice used by their development team and also use of old unsupported code:

   <OBJECT ID=”WB” WIDTH=0 HEIGHT=0 CLASSID=”CLSID:8856F961-340A-11D0-A96B-00C04FD705A2″>
     </OBJECT>
   <SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript1.2″>
   <!–
   function winload()
   {
   if(navigator.appName==”Microsoft Internet Explorer”)
   {
   var BrowserVerStr =navigator.appVersion;
   parts = BrowserVerStr.split(“;”);
   var preBrowVer = parts[1]
   var BVNum=parseFloat((preBrowVer.substring(5,preBrowVer.length)))
   if (BVNum >= 5.5)
   {
   WB.ExecWB(45,2)
   }
   else
   {
   window.close()
   }
   }
   }
   //–>
   </SCRIPT>

2. Every page in Infinity gives a warning like ‘This page contains secure and insecure items’ warning page, which is rather very irritating when one seriously is involved in a banking transaction. There hasn’t been any visible effort by the bank to correct the same too.
3. Citibank Online seems to be nurturing an aspiration to make internet banking as difficult as possible for the user. You have to logon using a big debit or credit card number. Only a few days now, they have started to bring the concept of storing a nickname for the number and that too as a cookie in the computer. So if you use five to six computers to logon to Citibank Online, you would need to setup the nickname in five to six computers. You also end up effectively in divulging your debit/credit card numbers to multiple systems and the fiscal peril increases its wings and dimensions when you are using a shared computer from a library or an internet kiosk. Standard Chartered was using this workaround long time back but now they have migrated it to a friendly username rather than beguile numbers for logon process.
4. All these internet banking applications also have something called timeouts. Even if you are typing a long message to customercare, the timer still keeps ticking and half away through the message the clock would alarm and signout of the application, if you aren’t careful. Not sure, what is causing them to monitor keystrokes within the application and have the timer automatically renewed.

I just thought I would share these observations with other readers so that people can be careful whilst dealing with these buggy internet applications.

 

The Other avatars of Telemarketing

The Other avatars of Telemarketing

 

Whilst GoI has endeavored through its DoT and brought in the NDNC to curb the acute telemarketing menace to a little control, I am sure, many of us would share the tale that other forms of vicious, dubious, unrelenting and barbarious marketing attempts are continuing unabated. Let us see two forms of such marketing over here:

1. Mobbing
2. Reference Spamming

Mobbing: Spot any big technology park or a business establishment in Chennai and at the entrance of the building you can find scores of marketing agents vying with each other with printed pamphlets with some weird mobile numbers. They not only obstruct the free passage, entry and exit of people to the business establishment but also cause a lot of hullabaloo in the environment. You can also find such personal loan agents in front of ATMs.

 

Reference Spamming: If you had taken a credit with a bank, most probably you might be getting a lot of such calls requesting to give the numbers of your friends so that marketing can be targetted on them too. Using this reference as a shield, the banks do away the allegation of unsolicited call under the cover of ‘reference’. I would also draw your attention to our earlier discussion on this topic over here.

 

The latter two can be ‘contained’ if the cops are little active and come out of their shell of deep slumber and lethargy.

 

BSNL CBI Campaigns on Anti Corruption Drive

BSNL CBI Campaigns on Anti Corruption Drive

 

For the past few days, there had been an aggressive text message campaign by BSNL in support of CBI Voice against rampant corruption that is widely prevalent and deep-rooted in every possible government department in our country. I just thought I would share the message with other readers so that it would be a little support for them too besides that more people can get the message and benefit from the same.

 

Email Address to Report: sp1acchn (at) cbi.gov.in

Telephone Numbers: +91 44 28255899

Text Message your Report at: +91 94440 49224

 

Feel free to share it with your friends and relatives too.

 

Customer Care Of Private Banks in India — ‘We make the customer to pull out the hair in despair’

Customer Care Of Private Banks in India — ‘We make the customer to pull out the hair in despair’

 

The latest trend of many private banks and other establishments like Vodafone India seems to be making customer care very hard to reach for the naive customer. They usher to ensure that the customers are just cows to milk as much as possible without needing to benefit them. Here are a few recent developments.

 

1. Citibank: Whenever you call Citibank India, you would be required to punch in your long debit card number first. A few months before you were prompted to enter your telephonic PIN (to waive off any crazy q&a session with that cabbage phone banker). They have intentionally modified this to entering your date of birth. But when you transfer to the customer care, you should again opt to exercise your choice (1) Pending Query (2) General Query. You need to brief to them first your problem. He would summarize you again. Now he would put you on the IVRS to authenticate your TPIN. Again you have to brief them since by the time you go to IVRS and come, there is a good ninety per cent chance that the phone banker would forgotten your query only to greet you with ‘Thanks for authenticating your TPIN. How can I assist you?’.
2. Standard Chartered: Even after you authenticate TPIN, you are always forced to have some interactive Q&A session with the phone banker. Some of the questions are:
   1. What is your name? [In future, they might include ''What is your dog's name?' too. ]
   2. What is your account number/full card number? [Can't they read it from the input I have already given to the IVRS?]
   3. What is your date of birth?
   4. What is your mailing address? [They might tweak this to "Where did you have your hair cut this Sunday?"]

      I challenged them quite a few times on the need for this redundant validation. They just have the same standard gibberish scribble (through Internet) and feeble replay (on the phone) that ‘for security reasons’. Not sure what is that curiosity in the crazy security procedure they are trying to use.

3. Vodafone: Vodafone is another set of jokers. I believe we have a good length discussion on this topic already here.

There is also another incident with Citibank CustomerCare. I used an ATM near Tambaram and the Citibank statement was telling ‘Indian Bank Kancheepuram’. The phone bankers were just running away on challenging this info. When I wrote them, they wanted fifteen days to investigate and then scribble back with the crappy response that ‘You have withdrawn from Indian Bank, Kancheepuram’.

 

It is high time that we see that our funds are transferred to public sector counterparts and boycott these useless enterprises, who just make us feel uncomfortable.

 

An increasing phishing peril to Indian Banking Industry

An increasing phishing peril to Indian Banking Industry

At least the second part of June 2009 has witnessed a significant increase in the number of phishing websites that have been targetting indian banks. On a quick sample, my emailbox has been recieving on an average of 2 phishing emails per day from June 10 through June 21 and then the average has changed to 1 email per day from June 22 through June 28. I have been diligenty reporting each one to ibrm.co@axisbank.com and ibrm@axisbank.com so that these sites could be brought down quickly before they wreak havoc on more number of customers.

I am sure that the Anti-Phishing team at Axis Bank (and similar other banks) would have also recieved at least 10x number of similar phony websites. I just thought of sharing this message with other readers that they would need to exercise a heightened caution whilst transacting on their bank accounts online. Also, it takes a minute to report any such phishing email to your bank internet department so that this menace can be controlled quickly.

Here I would summarize a few email addresses to which you would need to report the full phishing email so that the internet banking team of the bank can bring such websites down.

1. Axis Bank: ibrm.co@axisbank.com (or) ibrm@axisbank.com
2. ICICI Bank: executivedirector@icicibank.com
3. HDFC Bank: fake.email@hdfcbank.com (and) support@hdfcbank.com
4. Citibank: indiaservice@citigroup.com
5. Canara Bank: cbgimb@canbank.co.in
6. State Bank of India: report.phishing@sbi.co.in

 

Recession days are triggering Retail Robbery

Recession days are triggering Retail Robbery

 

These days of recession seems to be driving some organizations in Chennai to resort to a kind of retail robbery in their own styles. I have two incidents to share.

 

• 51 months for Hutch (Vodafone) to completely close an unneeded mobile phone connection

Citibank Cash Deposit Melodrama: About three weeks back, I deposit around 1000 rupees in Cash Deposit in one of the Citibank ATMs. The normal procedure is that the cash payment gets credited to the account almost the next day though the bank stipulates 48 hours to safeguard for its inertia.

 

This time three days passed and there was no response from Citibank regarding the cash credit. The Citiphone as usual was acting as a good testimony for our ‘Thikkuvay Thandavarayan‘. When I wrote to indiaservice (at) citicorp.com, I got a random reply each day whilst trying to get updates from them. A few of them are:

 

1. No updates from collection team. They would get back in 3 days. After two days one email would come mentioning that they need more time and they woud get back in 3 more days.
2. They wanted a scanned copy of the ATM reciept to verify inspite of me giving all details over the very first complaint (the 4th day after deposit).
3. On asking if there would be late payment charge, they could not reply with confidence at all.

After one week, Citiphone started to divert calls to some one called ‘Senior Officer’, ‘Subject Matter Expert’. I am not sure how many nicknames their next cubicle colleagues would carry just to cheat the customers.

 

After three ways, they now credited the cash payment. But the very next day one guy purportedly from Citibank called me regarding on service feedback regarding the problem resolution and he got the bang from me from irritating me all along.

 

Just thought I would share these two incidents with other readers since these days of slowdown, some of the unscrupulous organizations in India are trying to make the best to loot customers by all forms of bad trade.

 

Landscaping in India

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We have been observing the following unruly boisterous scenes in many parts of our nation:

1. Reckless deforestation
2. Inhuman treatment of dumb animals
3. Destruction of public properties
   1. Pelting of stones on public transportation services like buses and derailing trains
   2. Reckless sticking of bills and stickers on fencing walls.

---

Yesterday I had a quick talk to a person who had been in the Electoral Services during last Lok Sabha elections. Along with the summary of key points learnt from him and also from the observations in Dallas, I would like to share a solution here for the partial set of maladies listed above.

According to the Election Commission of India report 2006, here is the list of political parties that are functioning in India. And now it is 2009. At least we have seen two new major political parties in Chennai coming up this period. They are DMDK (headed by Vijayakant) and TMMK (powered by Muslims in Tamil Nadu). Each of the parties claim a sizable chunk of supporters in each region.

If you take for example, Irving (Texas) has a citizen-powered community operating with this website. They have rich plans like the following:

1. Patrols in support of Irving Police
2. Landscaping support
3. Cleanliness of Roads
4. Strict discipline in public areas

I don’t think it is difficult to enforce similar strategies in our place. We do have something called ‘Friends of Police‘ in Chennai, but currently either of the Commissionarates (metro or suburban) is not interested in actively developing it. This blogger has personally written to cop@vsnl.net to get more details on the scheme. But there has been scant response to the emails.

When someone brings this to limelight, the state administration and police immediately excuse themselves as paucity of staff. The simple question is why can not the political parties’ muscle power and manpower be mobilized for the welfare of the country. The PDF from Election Commission website above lists a whopping number of political parties. If these strength can be channeled for landscaping and Friends of Police, I don’t think, it is that difficult to bring a stronger discipline in our nation, riot-free and make jobs difficult for terrorists and antisocials. Currently, the workforce of the political parties and their cadre are just misused to showcase the vote-bank strength of their leaders by shouting behind them slogans, going in processions, pelting stones at the slight stimulus of incidents against their leaders.

I think Lok Sabha elections are quite near. These political parties would disfigure very many apartments and building fences with their advertisements quite illegally. I just thought, if some one can make them think logically of using their cadre for a most constructive way for the nation. The nation currently reels under multiple challenges — economic turbulence and security issues. Currently, we don’t flocks of illogical mob chanting meaningless slogans against thier erring leaders. We only need handful of people who can exhibit true patriotism towards the nation in making it a peaceful piece of land on this planet.

 

A Sort of Inferiority Complex …

A Sort of Inferiority Complex …

Be it from the pages of history or the current day scenarios, there seemed to be a widespread inferiority complex amongst a section of the people. I am not sure on which category they should be put up in and hence I am leaving it to the wide and diversified speculation of the audience.

1. For some reason, I have been observing that Bharti Airtel always celebrates and nurtures a greed on the state-owned BSNL. Whilst they support Call Forwards to all other private networking counterparts, it always says ‘Request not completed’ for BSNL numbers. And again, if you raise this issue to Bharti CustomerCare, they only end up portraying themselves as characters that stand testimony for our Thikkuvay Thandavarayan.
2. There is one recent incident that I encountered and I just got confirmed with a lot of other friends that the newly launched BSNL Online Billing website does not load successfully through a complete transaction with either Airtel or Reliance connections. Tata Communications VSNL, BSNL and including many providers abroad do not face this issue. Is this again a treacherous initiative by Airtel standing testimony of their crooked initiatives in getting to the forefront by unethical means.
3. Around the fag end of last month (February), I had a quick visit to District Employment Office to have my employment card renewed. Again, those brandishing all those community-certificates seems to be suffering a sort of agony in front of those competing from ‘Open Competition’. This comes despite the fact that the state administration is pampering them even if they do not possess requisite competitive skills in the market. The need of the hour and the impeccable robust solution to this can only be bringing out ‘Merit Minority Institutions‘.
4. The recent uproar in Chennai High Court including pelting of rotten eggs on veteran advocate Subramanian Swamy and raising slogans peppered with caste-driven expletives against him is again a signal when sections of people are running into a sort of inferiority complex. They are unable to vent out their emotions and hence bursting out in a sort of hysteria. [News Source: http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=Advocates+assault+Subramanian+Swamy&artid=C0BGlaNexCk=&SectionID=lifojHIWDUU=&MainSectionID=wIcBMLGbUJI=&SectionName=rSY|6QYp3kQ=&SEO=Subramanian+Swamy;+advocates;+assault;+Janata+Part]

The better solution to the above inferiority complex would be setting up politically and industrially independant counselling units to cure the affected of their maladies.