Consumer is King » Consumer

Insurance company forced to pay compensation to consumer after not replying to a Right To Information Case

ashish — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 14:40:32 +0000

The Right To Information is a way of getting information from Government agencies that are not willing to provide the information when you would normally ask for it. Under the RTI Act, Government agencies are obliged to provide the required information unless there are specific security or personal privacy or commercial secrets involved. So what happens is that people who have business with a Government agency and are not getting the information from these agencies (something that can be very common) can use the RTI Act to get the required information; and if the information is not provided, a penalty is applied on the official concerned. Consider the case of this gentleman who needed to get information regarding his insurance policy and its premium payment (link to article):

MUMBAI: The Central Information Commissioner (CIC) has asked the United India Insurance Company Ltd (UIICL) to pay a compensation of Rs 5,000 to a citizen in a Right To Information case. Moreover, the commissioner has also imposed a penalty of Rs 22,000 on an official for dereliction of duty. In his order dated March 23, information commissioner A N Tiwari ordered UIICL to pay a compensation of Rs 5,000 to A M Attar—who had filed an RTI query—for the “detriment suffered by him’’ and also slapped a fine of Rs 22,000 on a senior divisional manager in Mumbai.
After a series of hearings, the commissioner said the senior divisional manager had got an RTI query on September 16, 2007. Though he had got the requisite information from the agent concerned on September 29, 2007, the information was forwarded to CPIO, regional office on Dec 27, 2007. Thus, there was a delay of 88 days on his part, the commissioner said.

Interior design forced to pay Rs 1 lakh penalty for not completing the work promised, forcing the hiring of another firm

ashish — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:28:40 +0000

When you are setting up a new shop or a new business with clients / consumers coming to visit the office or location, there is a need to ensure that the place is attractive and gives a good appearance. Getting the design to be attractive is very important, and it is equally important that the work to make the place attractive is done in time and as part of a integrated project. So, it is essential that whoever is charged with doing the interior design and re-structuring of an office or shop gets the work done in time, and to your satisfaction. So what happens when this work does not happen in time, or the firm doing this delays the work and finally gives up ? You will need to re-plan your schedule, and hire somebody else to get the work done, resulting in a lot of mental aggravation and agony; one client took this to the consumer forum and got compensation (link to article):

The Mumbai Suburban District Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum this week ordered an architecture and interior designing firm to pay Rs 1 lakh to a shop owner for not executing work on time. Bhasin said after that she engaged S R Choudhary, a consulting architect, to assess the quality and quantum of work executed by the firm as well as the losses it caused her. In her complaint, she sought compensation for the losses and also demanded that the interior designers should pay her the money she had to give the other architect firm to complete the work.

Gurdeep Komalan and Associates argued that the delay was caused among other things, by “Bhasin’s unclear mind and her constant interference’’. They also blamed the weather, including the 26/7 flood for it, and denied that the architect, Sunil Komalan, would stay away and not supervise the work. However, the forum presided by J L Deshpande said there was no evidence that the plan was ever changed at the insistence of Bhasin, which pushed back the deadline.

This also means that whenever you have an interaction with an external firm, make sure that all status and changes are properly reserved and recorded.

Insurance company forced to provide insurance even when the disease was within a year of the policy (exclusion cause)

ashish — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 12:05:12 +0000

How many times have you seen that the insurance policy by an insurance company comes with certain conditions, mentioned in the small print. These are various sections that the insurance company will not cover, including when the person is indulging in adventure sports, goes in for risky activities, or in the case of life insurance policies, if the death is due to suicide or in mob action, or similar stuff. For medical policies, it is fairly common that many diseases are not covered in the first year of the policy, which is normally standard policy by the insurance company to cover themselves from people who know that they will need medical treatment soon, and thus want to go in for a policy to cover these costs. However, the insurance companies normally do not mention such exclusions prominently enough for people to understand and realize the impact of such exclusions. Now a state consumer forum has ruled that this clause was not valid since the consumer was not adequately informed of this exclusion (link to article):

The state consumer commission has directed an insurance company to pay medical expenses incurred by a patient within a year of taking a mediclaim policy even though the exclusion clause stated otherwise. The commission noted the insurance company was guilty of not bringing the exclusion clause to the notice of the policy holder while issuing the policy.
After his mediclaim was rejected by the company, the policyholder, Sushil Kumar, approached the Delhi district forum which directed it to pay Rs 1 lakh towards insured amount besides Rs 10,000 as compensation.

Penalties on electricity discoms in Delhi for failures proposed to be increased massively

ashish — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:26:51 +0000

Delhi used to suffer under bad quality of service from the earlier Government controlled DESU. So, when privatization of power supply in Delhi happened and the city was broken up into several zones, customers were happy with the hope that they will get more regular power for longer hours, less breakdowns, better customer service and other such improvements. Overall, while the condition is better than the time under DESU, there has not been the level of improvement that one would have expected from the entry of private discoms. People still suffer from power breakdowns, from bad customer service (including people not picking up the phone when the power goes down or lines not available, inflated bills, burnt meters not getting replaced early enough, and other such problems).
There have been numerous complaints over the years, but they do not seem to have really made matters better, with the Chief Minister also publicly criticizing some of these corporations for the bad level of service; but this is also true because the cost of not making things better is not much – so the penalties are not often applied, and even when applied, the penalties really do not cause the discoms much harm. A new proposal aims to increase the level of penalties and ensure that the cost that the discoms would be willing to take by continuing to offer bad quality increases considerably (link to article):

In a few weeks, discoms will have to pay the price for every deficiency in service. On Wednesday, power regulator Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) held a public hearing on its proposal to hike the penalty amount payable by discoms as suo motu compensation if they fail to pay the original penalty for deficiency in service. All the penalty amounts under the performance standard regulations may also be doubled. Sources said the new penalty amounts will be effected in another month.
If the discoms does not pay the compensation suo motu, then the consumer will have to be paid compensation which is five times the original amount,” said a DERC official. The draft also proposed that all consumer complaints that were made using any medium — telephone, SMS or even in writing had to be routed through a call centre, a unique compliant number and a permanent record of the complaint had to be made. The discoms have been asked to ensure that they run call centres with sufficient number of officials or employees for effective complaint handling.

This seems to be a good effort, but only if it is carried through and discoms have to pay penalty at a level that bites them.