Rogues galleria

MOLE'S EYE VIEW

It is ironical that the "rogues gallery" of professor Sri Ram Khanna boasts three sectors which are among the fastest growing in the country "" telecom, banking and financial services and consumer durables.

These are the sectors which receive the maximum number of complaints on the toll-free consumer helpline "" 1800 11 4000 "" conceived of by the consumer activist professor.

The 18-month old helpline processes thousands of calls from harrassed consumers across the country (about 3,400 calls in August, 4,100 in July and 5,800 in June) and guides them to secure their rights through a small working team of about 30 people.

Predictably, most calls originate in Delhi and Mumbai but there have been calls from remote states like Kerala, Assam and even J&K.

Complaints about services far outweigh the number of complaints against products, and taking pride of place in the services sector is telecom.

This "...continues to be an errant sector with irresponsible corporate behaviour," says the August report of the helpline. Ironically, it is leading companies like Airtel, Hutch, Idea, Reliance, Tata Indicom and MTNL which figure prominently on the complaints list.

It is also the leading banks like SBI, ICICI, PNB, Citibank and Standard Chartered which top the list of banking complaints, which ranged from incorrect charges, incorrect interest to unauthorised withdrawals. Rejection of claims was the main grievance with insurance companies.

LPG Gas consumers complained about under-weight, contamination and over-pricing (more than the maximum retail price) against vendors HPCL, IOC and BPCL.

The list of consumer durable companies which are supposed to have sold defective products reads like a veritable who's who of the industry "" from Godrej, LG, Samsung, Carrier, Whirpool, Haier, Samsung and even Zee (for DTH).

There were complaints related to adulteration (Pepsi, Miranda, Dew, Cadbury's chocolate), electricity services (NDPL, BSES, Reliance Energy), education, courier services (Blazeflash, DTDC), hospital services and credit card woes, where "the most frequently occurring problem is of leaking consumer's personal information".

While some companies have gamely "resolved" some complaints, they are outnumbered by the volume of unresolved, and many times unreported, grievances. Professor Khanna has a two pronged plan to tackle that.

On one hand, he plans to go multi-lingual on the help line, so that it becomes more accessible to more people. And he is also readying for some class-action suits.

"We don't have to win every case, but we are going to fight," says the professor. His larger fight, though, will be against the apathy of the long-suffering consumer who seems to have forgotten that any company can be "forced" to play fair.