Potential Sexual Harassment Incident at Equitas Bank

I received a call purportedly from Equitas Bank Relationship Manager on 30th August 2023 at 12.30 PM. Earlier incidents were intentionally revealing investment solicitations and hence had to be escalated and reported as Unsolicited Commercial Communication. However this time the caller was very professional and was only started asking gently about the following topics.

1. Ease of Use
2. Accessibility of Banking Service Interfaces
3. Pending Unresolved Issues/Grievances.

When the third was being discussed, seemingly another employee pulled the phone from her (RM) barging/gate crashing into the conversation and started selling about investment services and soliciting investments. During the switch a five letter slur word challenging the modesty of a female was heard to be hurled at the RM besides a chain of words indicating a few other unprofessional words demonstrating a serious misdemeanour of misogyny and giving a hint that the person could be a potential sexual predator and such persons and/or their gestures could be harmful in a safe workplace environment.

This also construes as a violation of The Vishaka Guidelines that were a set of procedural guidelines for use in India in cases of sexual harassment. They were promulgated by the Indian Supreme Court in 1997 and were superseded in 2013 by the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act.

A quick note of registration the call incident have been given a heads-up to the Telecom Department via DND framework to register an incident.    A copy of the complaint would also be sent to MoWCD and Principal Nodal Officer of the financial institution in a goodwill gesture to help the organization control any traces of hostile workspace triggers in the framework.

 

An Open Letter to Transport Department in Tamil Nadu

I have been strongly appreciating the wonderful initiative of the current administration when they unravelled the Pink Bus (aka) No-Fee travel for Women in the state. It is simply a laudable initiative and could be considered as a role model for other transport corporations across the globe. No doubt in the same. Since we have data regarding this scheme for an year and a half now and based on the usage patterns of the same I have done an informal study in my capacity and would like to submit the same to the Transport Department on a good citizenship initiative.

I have tried to ensure the study not just restricts itself to subsidised and/or No-Fee travel for Women but for other reservations and related topics as well.

1. We need to implement some kind of identification for travelling women preferably I could suggest an Aadhar based token system with a limited number of travels per day basis. Technically it is called Fair Usage Policy (FUP) and you can see this term often with telecom companies these days so that a section of the percentage does not overwhelm the available resources meant for a broader mass. This also ensures other variants of the transport corporation are also not left to ply empty. 
   The reason for suggesting this is because I have been observing some women just recklessly travelling to and from between next stops ferrying commercial goods for the shops run by their family men. And because of this genuine women who need to commute feel the buses are unduly overloaded and need to shell extra bucks for non-Bus routes.
2. We also need to curtail and/or impose a FUP or constraint on travel authority for school and college students.  I have a few recommendations here  for the same too.
   1. The travel authority for these people should be valid only along with the educational institution ID card.
   2. Additionally the travel should be allowed only on days when the educational institutions are functional besides only for pickup and drop times for the schools (+/- 2 hours). This is to avoid bunking of classes by students and would ensure near 100% attendance by the students.
3. The number of passes for Senior Citizens are very less compared to the above. This needs to be significantly increased along with apportioning more seats for them in the buses. Ideally an awareness among passengers to voluntarily give up seats when a Senior Citizen boards the bus would be appreciated.  Additionally it would be better if Senior Citizen passes are made to be distributed by conductors itself instead of forcing them to visit the so-called counters which are often painfully crowded and they are made to stand and wait in serpentine long queues exposed to hot weather.
4. Any of the subsidised or No-Fee travel should restrict from ferrying heavy luggages. The luggages if any should be charged. This is to avoid commercial exploitation of transport services that I have described in point number 1 above. (vide supra)
5. Hoarding and Blocking of Seats by Women and/or Students should be penalized strictly. This presents a very distasteful situation and ugly scenes onboard the buses. The seats must be strictly on a First Come First Served basis. Ideally I would also recommend scrapping of reservations of seats earmarking for Women which would ensure Gender Equality. I hear your comments that this could mean Eve-Teasing complaints will rise.  And that is the way we can identify potential pranksters (Eve-Teasers) who could be handed over to Law Enforcement for prosecution.

A copy of the note has been registered with the office of Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for requisite feasibility analysis and implementation

 

An Open Letter to RBL Bank …

Subject: Distasteful Gesture of RBL Bank, Untrustworthy/No-Confidence in Customer Care Executive and Sub-Par banking standards

Message:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I understand that RBL Bank has come up from a humble and modest beginning from Kolhapur with the name as Ratnakar Bank Ltd and then rebranded itself with a global identity as RBL Bank. However of late a number of gestures from RBL Bank is considered hostile for ethical banking business. A few of them are shared with the executive team here as a goodwill gesture to investigate into a feasibility study of imparting due renaissance and reformation into the banking practices.

1. The customer care team do not seem to any bank banking knowledge. Even basic concepts like transaction dispute, chargeback etc sounds like Latin and Greek for them.
2. Time taken for credit posting to transactions is humongous and customer care team (as outlined in (1) above) is absolutely useless in pursuing the progress of the same.
3. Potential insiders in RBL bank allegedly sell customer information to unethical telemarketers for Cold Calling at odd times.
4. RBL Bank team does not seem to be aware of telecom regulations in India and/or the requirement to be statutorily compliant with the same. All it matters for them is quantitative measure of calls made and leads generated.
5. Tie-ups with third grade companies like Bajaj Finance and their group could be ruining the good historical image of RBL Bank.
6. Social Media team of RBL team does not see to be manned by live persons but half-tested buggy bots considering the type of responses and messages posted by them.
7. Even for the calls made by customer care in request to our grievances through one of the channels, the following shortcomings are observed:
   1. Communication skills of the caller is extremely dis-satisfactory.
   2. The caller keeps bombing regardless of the call preferences in a deep urge to close the service request/ticket. The objective seems to be closing the ticket within SLA quantitatively instead of qualitative measure of the response to be tendered on the grievance in question.
   3. As a quick litmus test today I just put the caller muted for a while to see how they responded with their bad communication. The call ran up to 42 minutes. Good thing is that it could have generated some revenue for the bleeding telecom provider (Vodafone) which I guess was the communication line used by the calling unit.
8. RBL Online Banking when logged on always says there is no account linked to the customer. This particularly happens when there is no active bank account and only credit card. I have been trying to get this message ringing to your team but I guess they are not interested to resolve the technical issues in the website.
9. RBL Online Banking also does not have a way to show the Unbilled Transactions (Credit and Debit) besides the current outstanding (including unbilled).

Hence on a goodwill gesture I would like to bring these shortcomings to your attention and desk.

 

Shoddy Staff Behaviour at Vijayawada Railway Junction

 

We have been witnessing the following incidents with Vijayawada junction during my recent visits. As a quick tip to the South Central Railway Administration and Railway Board we would like to attract your attention to three incidents which indicate about a potential sadistic harassment of passengers causing physical and mental agony/discomfort.

 

1. January: COA-CGL train did not appear on the platform display till 5 minutes before the actual arrival of the train.
2. May: HYB-TBM train did not appear on the platform displays till 30 minutes after the actual scheduled arrival of the train. The 30 minutes delay of the train was not communicated too. The RPF who was sighted did not have any clues and was unfriendly. The commercial staff of the railways were guessing the platforms. The vendors were randomly spelling out the platforms as if they are playing a hide and seek with the passengers.
3. During the May visit also learnt from an informal survey with a section of passengers that missing of the train is not uncommon in this junction and then need to wait for other seat adjustments after requesting with the station authorities.

The Twitter handle of the station used to be I guess drm_bza (BzA station code indicating Bezavada the traditional name of the place). Not sure why it it was ad-hoc changed to drmvijayawada

Not sure if the above incidents qualify against incompetency of the station management or some sort of attitude issues but Railway Board need to take corrective actions to preserve the rich legacy of the railway station.

The following petition was sent to Railmadad monitored by RailwaySeva with a copy to Railway Board

 

Notoriety of Auto Mafia in Chennai

The notoriety of Auto Mafia in Tamil Nadu (particularly Greater Chennai City and Suburban) need to be controlled by the State Transport Department.

1. A significant number of Autos are not still having meters. Those with meters too refuse to ply by them and/or prefer pre-bargained high rates.
2. A variant of the Hire Autos called Share Autos are known to overload passengers particularly during peak hours in most parts of the city. This is particularly dangerous for every road user in that stretch.
3. The Autos do not seem to be abiding by any Road Rules.
   1. They pull over at any point sighting a potential ride mindless of the vehicles behind them.
   2. Often the autos are sighted parked obstructive way near bus stops/terminals etc.
   3. A significant amount of Wrong-side driving is also from the autos
4. Even the autos that are attached with aggregation service providers like Ola, Uber are violating several Motor Carriage Acts and Platform
   1. Refusing non-cash (digital) payments and insisting on Cash
   2. Asking more cash than what is shown on the app
   3. Not responding and/or delaying pickup location forcing to cancel and/or canceling after the alloted time to derive the cancelation fee benefits from the passengers.
   4. Asking or threatening the passengers to cancel the request and take the ride with them offline
   5. The cab aggregators enforcement seems to be minimal and hence state transport department needs to intervene in a more stringent disciplinary enforcements on erring auto-drivers (regardless of their political affiliations whatsoever)

Note: The petition is being filed with email address/mobile number alone because there is a potential limitation in CM Helpline (Home, Prohibition and Excise Sector) that if the address is given , redressal of the public grievance which applies pan-State is overlooked and only the jurisdictional limit is applied.

A copy of the above request has been sent to the office of Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for their kind attention.

 

Plight of Voicemail in India

Voicemail is for sure a definitive productivity enhancement tool that is intended as a rich time-saver to prevent leakage of our productivity in gossips that we do not need to be actively part of. Furthermore it ensures we do not get the risk of talking to Scammers and Spammers as these are effectively used as /dev/null by the Voicemail system.

However even the premiere telecom service providers in India have not been able to manage these Voicemail services perfectly. We have four operators currently providing telecom services in India. Here is how Voicemail is treated by each of them.

1. BSNL has effectively removed the Voicemail from their offerings in 2015
2. Reliance Jio does not even have any Voicemail product right from its inception in 2016
3. Vodafone had a broken voicemail system. They claimed to have completely revamped the same post the identity merge with Idea as Vi. But the newer one is not well documented. Despite being a unified identity the customer care has lame excuses like if you have Idea SIM then Voicemail services are not available. Also the pricing of the service is simply prohibitive.
4. Airtel has a partially working Voicemail system. They have FTN separate for each telecom circle but none of these are publicly documented. The agents do not have a knowledge about the services. When we ask about the same it all goes via a trial and error method.
1. For Tamil Nadu circle the activation itself gives Error through USSD code
2. For Tamil Nadu circle the activation through text gives a blocked message
3. For Tamil Nadu circle the activation through CustomerCare results in Service Request closure with a wrong FTN being configured to the account.
4. The CustomerCare claim that we need to deactivate all call forwarding for Voicemail to work. However the essence of Voicemail itself is selective call forwarding like ‘Unreachable’, ‘Busy’ and ‘Unanswered’ situations. Also the deactivation itself does not work giving a service error.
5. The short code 52555 is supposedly toll-free but not universally available on all Airtel circles and in National Roaming even on same circles. During on network Roaming you are expected to call a full access number at a premium charge which Airtel refuses to reimburse too.

 

A colossal failure of @TRAI DND System

Though the initiative of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (shortly known as TRAI) and Department of Telecommunications (DoT) towards curbing the pesky unsolicited commercial communications menace is laudable, the implementation has been very much shaky. The success rate of the same is just close to around 30% approximately as telemarketers often get scott-free making good of the loopholes in the system.

Not sure whether these reflect the gross incompetency of the IT team deployed by TRAI into the operations and/or some sort of unholy nexus between insiders with rogue telemarketers that is serving  as root of all these mess.

 

1. The delimiter comma often confuses the 1909 server because the message itself can contain comma. Either the server should be configured to read the commas from end of the message so that last comma is date time, penultimate one for senderid  or calleridand whatever rest is the message.
2. Presence of extended ASCII characters and special characters are crashing the app/server. The server must be configured to accept any characters in the message.
3. In Dual SIM phones not sure why the app wants to confirm through which SIM the message to be registered as this is very much recorded as part of the phonebook.
4. Randomly a few calls are mysteriously not listed out for being reported in the app.
5. There is no way for re-opening a falsely closed complaint in the system.
6. Frequently the status window does not open up. It just opens a blank dialog with a OK button.

We would suggest GoI try to opensource the App on GitHub for colloborative computing among competent personnel and NIC Meity team can only be left with the job of publishing to the server. The current IT team in TRAI, is proving to be  totally incompetent the handle the pesky call menace.

We have reported a section of these showstoppers two weeks ago to their email address and even the breaking errors have not been cared for and/or fixed.

A letter on this topic has also been filed as a petition with the office of Hon’ble Prime Minister of India.

 

Plethora of Unauthorized Trespassing in Railway Premises

 

Beggars and Eunuch activity in every railway premises. A regular survey in the railway station operational within Southern Railway (Tambaram) for a period of 8 weeks (monitoring the busy weekend evening of #Friday) revealed that regular pseudo beggars are not uncommon. Despite being reported through Railway Seva (the passenger care support center) and Rail Madad (who is actually the postman to delegate to the appropriate business units) this menace continues unabated.

RailMadad team is quite fast in marking the complaint resolved than reaching a genuine milestone of resolution and gathering a default feedback  as Satisfactory on the same. Sometimes this feedback remains un-editable even if the complainant feels otherwise.

We had due diligently reported about eunuch activities between PZA (Palavanthangal) to St Thomas STM. Though it happens in many routes this particular leg for Chennai Suburban witnesses a real high and also very regular in most compartments from pre-dawn to post-dusk. And at Tambaram station every Friday evening we can see a regular set of begging gangs visiting particularly outbound platforms like 5/6 and 7/8. The resolution from the zonal office ends with delegating the same to the station RPF who assign to some lower level ASI that just walks through the crime scenes for a while, clears it for name sake and disappears. And as they disappear the gangs re-appear again.

This person is NOT a passenger but is seen on a daily basis targeting south bound night train passengers on platform 8 seeking alms and begging. #Tambaram@srdscmas
@RailMinIndia
@RailMadad
@DrmChennai @RailwaySeva pic.twitter.com/trl72gzI5l

— Deepak Kumar Vasudevan (@lavanyadeepak) December 2, 2022

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And yesterday we witnessed a similar begging racket at Vijayawada station (BZA). On a good citizenship gesture when we reported we only ended up with a bunch of calls from the RPF person instead of taking it as a cue, looking up the CCTV and narrowing down on the trespassers. Honestly I do not want to get into any arguments with the field RPF patrol constables because they resolve the complaint or not is secondary but they bring a bunch of papers called Feedback forms which they expect us to sign and give them to close the complaint first in a gesture to show some Task Completed status to their higher-ups.

Apprehended the lady and brought her to post. On enquiry, the lady was not a beggar. She lost her purse and asking for help to purchase ticket to go to her home town. Informed her not to do like this on Rly station.

— RPF VIJAYAWADA DIV (@rpfscrbza) January 21, 2023

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The above is the response from RPF Vijayawada towards evening. But honestly I do not see a viable proposition to accept such alibi.

 

Not sure if the alibi of the #victim could be accepted as such considering similar incidents at #Railway premises.https://t.co/HQabOgqMvc@RPF_INDIA@srdscmas@RailwaySeva

— Deepak Kumar Vasudevan (@lavanyadeepak) January 22, 2023

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This is the response I have furnished to them back.

We need the RPF and Indian Railways to have a root level radical renaissance done on the security system of the railway premises.

 

 

 

Airtel DTH Support Executives in Chennai hell-bent to scam users

 

Recently I had a requirement to have the remote control of Airtel HD Set Top Box has the current one had worn out due to its age. Despite my request loud and clear about where to order the same and its price, the social media team was particular about sending a service engineer charging a steep visitation charge for the same.

The clarification sent again remained unanswered till the date of this publishing.

 

Hence I dropped a subsequent email to Airtel Digital TV support with a cc to DTH Nodal Team. After a couple of days I had some one assigned as a service engineer. Despite me trying to reach the person for clarifications he never responded back in time. And when he responded he was citing a charge of 400 but then tried to cover it up for remote control for Airtel XTreme. He still wanted the visiting charges over and above this amount.

When the issue was again escalated to Airtel, the service engineer changed who maintained the same stand but this person then dropped off and recommended a non-Airtel version in the neighborhood for 80 (Not sure if he was sarcastic or was redirecting to another malicious substandard product). On a goodwill gesture this was again referred back to Airtel Nodal Team.

Now another lady talked to me from a service support team who after a bargain was offering another brand for 150. When I told not interested and cancel the request she wanted to spell out the OTP she will send to cancel the request. And the OTP which came was the signon OTP for Airtel Thanks app. Not sure why she wanted to signon to Airtel Thanks app impersonating me.

 

 

 

 

Pathetic state of Government Veterinary Polyclinic (Tallakulam, Madurai).

 

Animals have right to be treated for emergencies. The clinic is run in a very unprofessional and unethical way. You will find syringes with needles all over the place. The same table is used for parvo infected and healthy dogs. Proper disinfection is not done leading to cross infection. Night emergencies are not attended regularly.

In today’s incident, a lady who brought her two pet dogs affected with Parvo and in a serious condition had to wait for two hours until a complaint was escalated to higher authorities in Chennai. Only after that the doctor came and treated the sick dogs. They took a photo of the treatment to cover up their blunders and unethical behaviour. This is sheer medical negligence and should not go unpunished.

The in-charge of the clinic should be held responsible for death of any pets due to negligence. Blaming the pet parent is very wrong as she brought her pets as soon as they fell sick. She was in tears. She was relieved only after they were treated.

The latest update is that one of the pet succumbed to the infection. I wouldn’t even spare to file a police complaint on the particular doctor(s) who were responsible for Negligence of Duty and I would consider even filing a murder complaint on them since I feel it is akin a cold-blooded murder.

We have this incident reported to the Mudhalvarin Mugavari (the Chief Minister’s Special Cell) of Tamil Nadu.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YouTube Video:  https://youtube.com/shorts/aYnagCP2WBc?feature=share