HDFC Bank — 100 ft Road Indira Nagar Bangalore branch: Forceful extraction of 10 times locker rent without notice/info/intimation

Address:

Bangalore, Karnataka

100 feet road Indira Nagar branch, Bangalore, has forcefully extracted INR 10, 000 from my savings account, towards annual rent for a small locker, without prior information, notice or any kind of intimation whatsoever. Please note that the rent of the same locker was INR 1, 000 only until last year, and i have been paying the same for the last 5 years. Apparently tons of HDFC account holders are facing the same threat, and many of them have opted to surrender their lockers and get their money back as the only viable option left to them. I approached the branch head, Vedantam Saikia, and he flatly refused to provide any relief or apology, and said a letter was sent to me that did not reach me, and that he has information of the letter not having reached me, and yet did not think it was important to inform me. His excuse was that the same info was published on the HDFC website for a few days for people to go there and take notice. He gave me two options, 1. To invest a large sum and thereby become a privileged customer and get a discount on the extracted amount 2. To forfeit the locker immediately and get a refund. Investing a large sum is not everyone's cup of tea on such short notice, and forfeiting locker means everything in it needs to be relocated safely somewhere, and in such short notice it is next to impossible to get another locker. So both the options given to me have left me helpless, and have further aggrevated my concern and stress. Also i realize that asking me to surrender my locker means that the branch intends to make some money with it. It will obviously be handed over to an affluent customer through whom the branch can have some lucrative investments, that they were unable to force me into, and that would lead to some incentives for people like Saikia. I have tried every possible avenue in HDFC grievance system to seek help and have failed miserably. It all looks like an amazingly self-sustained conspiracy that has been designed to suck your livelihood out of you and not provide you any help of benefit ever. As per my understanding, RBI should discourage such malpractices and blacklist branches practicing such procedures against customers. It shocked me that banks in our country have been provided so much power to loot us unconditionally, and that our lives and meagre possessions are so fragile that they can be shattered by any such bank any day.