Recovery agents: When fair is foul

Neha / TNN / Dec 4, 2005, 02:31 IST

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In a city whose middle class population is thriving on loan culture, recovery agents are the latest nightmares.

NEW DELHI: "As if harassment over the phone was not enough, recovery agents visited my residence to enquire about unpaid instalments. Worse, they even took away the vehicle I had purchased on loan. It was very humiliating."
No aberration, this experience. In a city whose middle class population is thriving on loan culture, recovery agents are the latest nightmares.They threaten, abuse, and in one recent case, even abetted suicide.
Are our banks playing dirty despite Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) guidelines against unfair practices during debt-collection? Times City spoke to some of the banks and recovery agents for their side of the story.
If the banks are to be believed, the private agencies hired by them for debt-recovery are anything but rude to customers.

Said Charu Deshpandey, spokesperson, ICICI Bank: "Banks rope in private agencies to collect debt as it is not possible to keep a track of all loans and employ our own human resource for that purpose.
All these private agencies are trained and supposed to follow a code of conduct, breaching which, they can be sacked."
It works like this: Banks prepare a list of defaulters and hand it over to the agencies who are paid according to their success rate.

"The agency is supposed to follow up defaulters within a stipulated time-frame. Defaulters are reminded over the phone first.
If that fails, personal visits are made and if that too does not help, legal notices are served before taking any action like carrying away the vehicle," said a spokesperson of Citibank.
Rules might be there but they remain in the books, alleged many consumers. Even missing one instalment is not forgiven, said many. "There might be stray cases of heated arguments as a result of misbehaviour by the customer.
But recovery agents can't be rough to them," the Citibank spokesperson added. So what do the recovery agents say? "Our work is limited to making calls to the banks and following up on the customers.
Most of the times, they just need gentle reminders. There is no question of playing rough if the customer is fair.
But there have been some instances of defaulters taking the reminders as harassment," said Kavi Ghai, owner of a recovery agency.
Some of these loan-recovery agents, however, admit to getting tough with difficult customers. "Based on the delay in payment, customers are divided into various categories.
We do not rough up people who have missed just one or two instalments. But habitual defaulters are taught a lesson," said another recovery agent on condition of anonymity.

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