GUWAHATI, Aug 28 � The number of complaints received by the Office of the Banking Ombudsman for the North Eastern region is increasing gradually with the office registering 807 cases during 2012-13 against 708 cases in the previous year, recording a nearly 14 per cent increase.
ATM-cum-debit card and credit card related complaints top the list of the complaints received by the office with 184 such cases during 2012-13, followed by 152 cases under the �failure of commitment� segment and 107 cases related to general loans.
Anand Prakash, Banking Ombudsman for Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura told reporters here that the increase is noticed due to the intervention of the OBO and its regular awareness drives in different areas of the region.
Most of the cases of banking ombudsman were lodged in Assam during the years 2011-12 and 2012-13, with other States of the region still registering a very small number of cases. In 2012-13, 617 cases against the banking services were lodged in Assam, whereas there were 536 such cases in the State during the previous year.
Of the 807 cases received in 2012-13, 379 cases were against the SBI Group, 271 cases were against other nationalised banks and 109 cases were against private sector banks. Again, in the private sector, 36 cases were against HDFC, 34 cases were against Axis Bank and 26 cases were against ICICI, as per the RBI data.
�The Banking Ombudsman Scheme was introduced in 1995 by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and over the years, the scheme has been amended to target a wider audience. Any customer can now complain to the Banking Ombudsman against the deficiencies in almost any banking service including credit cards, ATM and Internet banking after exhausting the available channel with the bank concerned,� said the Banking Ombudsman for the region.
Anyone can directly lodge their bank related complaint at [email protected] and also can get detail on banking ombudsman schemes at http://www.rbi.org.in/commonman.
