Views and Reviews

Recently Election Commission of India has launched a National Citizen Grievance Portal where one can report any issues regarding free and fair conduct of polls in our country, specifically the upcoming Lok Sabha one in April – May 2019.

However our experience with the portal as serviced from Tamil Nadu by its regional coordinates seems be failing our trust in the body because the complaints are surreptitiously closed and even allied news sources claim that reports are being dismissed without proper investigation raising eyebrows on whether there is a mole in the body which is acting hand in glove with unscrupulous politicians in the state.

A copy of the complaints are enclosed here.

We have escalated this to the office of The President of India. Stay tuned for more updates.

When compared to all other banks as of now, HDFC has been defying all rules, regulations and discipline enforced by the apex bank. I would like to bring to the attention of this media few particular issues that have well been escalated to HDFC Corporate but they have been covert in accepting the issue.

1. Even if you are on fully blocked NDNC list, HDFC tele-callers bug you at odd times towards unsolicited personal loans, unrequested credit card etc. If you try to warn them friendly, then at times these tele-callers turn hostile and even start showering harsh local expletives on you before disconnecting the phone call.
2. When escalated to the corporate HDFC takes a few weeks in slumber and then callously close the complaint citing that the number does not appear in their empanelled list of tele-callers. So that is an easy way for the corporate to clean off their onus of handling a telecom violation.
3. Once I travelled in the bus accompanied by a person with HDFC badge and he shared a few startling revelations.  This happened a few weeks ago before the date of this posting and hence it is most probable that these issues still prevail.
   1. HDFC forces their executives to ensure that application forms for personal loans and credit cards are only filled by them and just blindly signed by the applicants. The reason behind this that they want to ensure the application gives them unobstructed rights to call you and communicate any promotional offers because the opt-in for the same is given on behalf of you by the executive.
   2. The executive also ensures to opt in for unnecessary services like Card Protection and thus every month or in a pre-stipulated period, the card account is debited to a few thousand rupees for some credit card protection plans.
   3. The executive also added the HDFC is planning a layoff sometime this year due to a slump in their profits.

      The above two issues have also been uncommented by the corporate despite seeking their clarifications.

I hope Reserve Bank of India takes some concrete steps into the functioning of this private sector bank proactively and bring them onto disciplined operation mode.

Recently I tried to report a few civic issues with Chennai Corporation ERP.  The so-called OTP (One Time Passcode) verification key did not come through. I tried a host of other mobile numbers with different service providers but OTP failed to come through. If it had been a single service provider issue I could accept the problem is in my side. But each of them (Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, BSNL and Reliance Jio) could not be down in one instance.

So I took to CpGrams and had the same reported to The Deputy Collector, Corporation of Chennai.  The response which came after two weeks was quite absurd. Instead of trying to understand the root cause of the issue, narrow down on the technical glitch and solve the same they have gone in a different direction and produced a statistical report on how much grievances they have received to date and hence coming to the conclusion that their systems are up and running.

And most funny thing is that I do not understand why one of the words like submitted has been crossed in ink and endorsed in writing as informed.

Nothing is 100% correct. To err is human and to forgive is divine. So when we spot some error it is wiser to take one small step to have the same reported to the the owner of the entity on whom the error is spotted so that they at least endeavor to take some steps to ensure the error is rectified.

Any ethical entity owner will always ensure that their entities run impeccably without any issues.  I remember there was one quote in Hotel Arjuna at Tiruvallur which says if you are satisfied with our services please tell your friends about the same. If you have any concerns or complaints, please report the same to us. Commenting on the back of the entity owner regarding issues and giggling over the same is a shameful task. Let us not resort to such cheap tactics.