Will CESC clarify?

For the past several days, persons claiming to be licensees of  Chamundeshwari Electric Supply Company (CESC) are going around from house to house in J.P. Nagar where I live, changing ordinary electric meters to digital electric meters. and collecting Rs. 30 as service fee. They do not carry ID cards nor do they issue receipts for the amount collected. So I have been advising my neighbours not to pay the amount. Are these people authorized by CESC? If so, why is a service charge being collected for something that should be done for free? If a service charge has to be levied, why is it being collected without issuing receipts? Why can't CESC include it in the next monthly bill instead of collecting it like this? Will CESC clarify before the charge is collected from more people?

G.L.Nagaraj Urs, Mysore Grahakara Parishat

Mysore needs a Passport office

Mysore is second largest city of Karnataka State. It is  also a very important higher education centre. Thousands of students pass out with professional degrees every year. A large section of these students go to other countries for higher education. Quite a large chunk of these students get absorbed by companies with international operations. In both of these cases thousands of youngsters are seeking passports to pursue their ambitions.

Also thousands of youngsters from Mysore are seeking semi-skilled work in the Middle East countries and they are also seeking passports.

Mysore has a very large number of families and households from where children have either settled abroad or working or studying abroad and their parents and relatives seek passports to join their kith and kin abroad.

Mysore is also a cultural centre of international repute.Hundreds  singers, musicians,dancers and Yoga exponents from this city travel all round the world spreading the fragrance of Karnataka’s culture.

Apart from Mysore people also from neighbouring towns such as Chamrajanagar, Mandya and Mercara need passports for the very reasons mentioned above

At present, all these people have to go to Bengaluru for any and every issue relating to passport. This is not only time-consuming but also expensive.

Despite all the claims made by the concerned Department announcing people-friendly procedures in seeking services relating to passport things are under the control of touts and agents. This makes the seeking passport services more cumbersome, uncertain and expensive particularly for Mysoreans.

It is time that concerned authorities and the our member of Parliament took note of this requirement of Mysoreans and get a passport office at Mysore at the earliest.

R.Chandra Prakash, Mysore Grahakara Parishat

Consumer Court orders cannot be challenged in High Courts

In a major decision given recently (IV (2012) CPJ 1 (SC)), the Supreme Court has said that orders given by consumer courts can not be challenged in High Courts.

The Consumer Protection Act provides a hierarchy of appeals. If one is not satisfied with the decision of the District Consumer Forum, one can appeal to the State Consumer Commission. From the State Consumer Commission, one can appeal to the National Consumer Commission and from there to the Supreme Court. But many persons not happy with the decisions of the consumer courts have appealed to High Courts under Article 226 of the Constitution which empowers High Courts to issue certiorari orders quashing orders of lower courts. Such appeals were being accepted by the High Courts, thus short-circuiting the hierarchy of appeals prescribed by the Consumer Protection Act.

In the case before the Supreme Court, Kerala High Court  had decided on a writ appeal filed against a decision of the National Consumer Commission. This was challenged before the Supreme Court. In its judgment, the Supreme Court said, "...we can not help but state in absolute terms that it is not appropriate for the High Courts to entertain writ petitions under Article 226 of the Constitution of India against the orders passed by the Commission, as a statutory appeal is provided and lies to this Court under the provisions of the Consumer Protection Act, 1986. Once the legislature has provided for a statutory appeal to a higher court, it can not be proper exercise of jurisdiction to permit the parties to bypass the statutory appeals to such higher court and entertain petitioners in exercise of its powers under Article 226 of the Constitution of India."

Therefore, even though Article 226 of the Constitution gives High Courts the power to overturn decisions given by consumer courts, the Supreme Court has stated that when there is provision for statutory appeals, it is not appropriate for the High Courts to use that power. As a result, from now on, both parties in a consumer dispute will be constrained to follow the hierarchical appeal process prescribed by the Consumer Protection Act.

G.L.Nagaraj Urs, Mysore Grahakara Parishat I

A useful facility of the Railways

Railways have introduced a new facility which is bound to be very useful to the public. If anyone visits this site website , they can see all the trains running at that time all over India on a map. They are shown as arrows moving on lines representing railway tracks between various cities.

You can enlarge any portion of the map and you can focus on one line such as Bangalore-Mysore. The Bangalore-Mysore line at 6.10 PM on Saturday, 22-12-12 is shown in the picture. The various arrows are various trains going in the direction of the arrow. There are 5 arrows between Mysore and Bangalore representing, sequentially, Mysore-Bangalore Rajyarani Express, Mysore-Bangalore Mayiladudurai Express, Mysore-Bangalore Passenger, Bangalore-Mysore Passenger and Mysore-Bangalore Yashwantpur Express You can also see a train approaching Mysore on the Arasikere line and 5 trains near Bangalore on other lines. The blue colour of the arrows indicate that they are on time (meaning, they are not more than 15 minutes later than they should be). If they are more than 15 minutes overdue, they are shown as red arrows. If you click on the arrows, you will get more details on that train. The information on all the trains is updated every 5 minutes and so you can see the arrows (representing the trains) actually move. The website states that all information is a few minutes out of date because of security reasons, but this should not be a problem for most of the public.
Prof. B.S.Shankara, Mysore Grahakara Parishat 

Excess fees charged by share brokers

In the pursuit of more revenue or profits, consumers are being charged more than what the law (often the letter and more often the spirit) permits. Many banks and financial institutions are charging maintenance charges separately, when they should be covered by the profits earned by investing the depositors' money. City Corporations are levying additional fees and cesses for providing certain services, when the law says that these services should be covered by the property tax levied by the Corporations.

Another such example is before us. We have received complaints that some share brokers are levying postage fees when such postage should be covered by the standard brokerage fee collected by the broker. We see merit in such complaints.

In addition to charging postage fee separately, when it should be covered by the brokerage fees, we noticed that the broker had charged Rs. 10 for postage to the consumer-investor when the actual postage was only Rs. 2.50. The broker had further charged Rs. 1.24 as service tax on the postage. But there is no service tax on ordinary postage! Since there is no legal provision for service tax on ordinary postage, it can not be remitted to the government. Then, where does the money thus wrongly collected from the investors go?

We also noticed that there are some brokers who do not charge separately for postage and service tax. So we have asked the Securities Exchange Board of India and the National Stock Exchange of India the following questions:

1) Is a broker entitled to charge separately over and beyond the standard brokerage feesÿfor posting mandatory contract note and statement of accounts to investors?
2) Is a broker entitled to recover a service tax from the investor on an ordinary postÿfranked at Rs 2.50 which is exempt from service tax? Can a broker charge Rs. 10 for postage when he incurs only Rs. 2.50 towards actual postage? Do SEBI rules and NSE guidelines allow such charges?

If this malpractice is allowed more heads of illegal charges and irregular service tax are likely to be introduced to harass the consumer-investors.

V.Mahesha, Mysore Grahakara Parishat 

The Muddle of Voters Lists

Elections, both state and central, are drawing near and the people are gearing themselves to vote once again. But the government is making it as difficult as possible for the people to exercise their right to vote. Here are just a few problems voters are facing:

1. To find out if you are a registered voter is just about impossible. To find out if your name is still on the voters list, the officials tell you to go to the polling booth you went to vote in the last election, but when you go to that booth, you will find that not all booths have the information. You have to check a few booths (which are mostly primary schools) in the neighbourhood before you find the booth with the information. Even if you locate the correct booth, the teacher who has been entrusted with the job is not generally available during working hours. When you finally meet the right person, it is still difficult to find the needed information. The voters list they have is not well-organized and also incomplete and they have difficulty in finding your name in it. Since they have only one copy of the list, they are unwilling to give it to you and so you can not go through it methodically either.

If you decide that instead of all this hard work, you will sit at home and use the internet to find your name in the voters list, your situation is not much better. The Karnataka Election Commission's website does not give the voters list, but offers to search for your name in the list. It fails to do so very often. The website infobytes.in gives you voters lists, but they are outdated and very difficult to locate names, since there is no discernible order to the entries and the names are not indexed.

2. The names of many voters who have a voter's ID and who voted in the last election have found their names missing from the voters list. How can this happen? Who is responsible?

3. If you see the voters list of your street, you will find dozens of strange names, people you have never met and people you are sure do not live in your neighborhood. Once in a while, officials come to check, but these names mysteriously continue to be present in the voters list, while the names of people who actually live in your neighbourhood are deleted for not living in the address shown! More surprisingly, in the same family which stays at the same address, some names continue as valid while others have been deleted.

4. Voters have also been transferred on a large scale to new booths without any logic. Some of the new booths are nearby but some are far from the present booth. For example, I live with my wife, my son and daughter-in-law in J.P.Nagar. We all voted in booth no. 169 in J.P.Nagar in the last election. But now, in the new voters list, my wife and I continue to be at booth no. 169 while the names of my son and daughter-in-law have been moved to booth no. 160 in Srirampura which is 3 km from our house. Shifting of names from booth no. 169 to 160 seems to have happened to more than two hundred people of Main Roads 17-20 of J.P.Nagar. Why has this happened? How can one expect people, especially senior citizens, to go so far to vote?

5. Many names, addresses, ages, names of husband/father and gender listed in the voters list are incorrect. I have thus far given 9 applications for corrections to the voters list information of my family and have obtained acknowledgments for them. But till now, none of the mistakes have been rectified. At least I am better off than some people I know who have submitted such applications. When they point out an error in the name, the error is corrected, but a new error in the address is introduced. When they submit another application for the correction in address, the address gets corrected, but the age which was correct earlier is now changed. The authorities seem determined to keep the number of errors constant. Or maybe they are keeping them as a "beauty spot"!

Also, for every correction, however minor, you have to submit a passport size photo, or they will not accept your application. The application form is so complicated that a person with average education will not be able to complete it correctly.

6. The old voter ID cards of many of us had numbers which started with KT. But the government has announced that these have been changed to numbers beginning with SLC. We are now wondering if the officials are familiar with the change and if their voter IDs will be rejected at the time of voting.

It appears that there is no supervision and no accountability for the officials and staff handling voters lists as well as the private agencies they hire. Officials say that it is the responsibility of the citizens to check if their names are in the voter lists and reregister if the names are missing. But who has the time, effort or money to do this every time? Instead of making it easy for the voters to exercise their civic right, officials are doing everything to make it difficult. Some people whose names are missing from the voters list have already given up the fight and are not reregistering. They will not vote in the next election. If this trend continues, more and more people will stop voting and democracy in our country will be dead.

G.L.Nagaraj Urs, Mysore Grahakara Parishat 

Mushrooming of Service Apartments

"Service apartments" built on residential sites are mushrooming all over the city. There is no essential difference between service apartments and hotels and so service aprtments must be considered commercial buildings and hence can not be permitted on residential sites.

Secondly, many of these "service apartments" have no parking space. For example, one such building which is about to be completed in Yadavagiri is a 1+4 building in which the bottom floor must be, by law, used exclusively for parking. But it is not being done. The road and the footpath are already clogged by vehicles of patients, staff and visitors of a nearby hospital and if we add the vehicles coming to the service apartments, the road will be a nightmare for both vehicles and pedestrians.

A bank had its office in the ground floor of this building about 15 years ago. Since it was the same parking space referred to above, MCC issued a notice and the bank vacated the premises. It is not clear why the parking space has been encroached again. Does it have the sanction of MCC?

We hope that Mysore City Corporation takes this issue seriously and act quickly. 

B.V.Shenoy, Mysore Grahakara Parishat 

Exam Answer Sheets Covered by RTI Act

In a decision given recently, the Supreme Court has said that the exam answer sheets of a student have to be provided to him for inspection if he applies for them under the Right to Information Act.

In this case, a candidate who had written a CBSE exam was dissatisfied with the marks he had obtained and had applied for inspection of his answer sheets under the RTI Act and the CBSE had rejected his application citing rule 8(1)(e) of the Act which exempts information held in a fiduciary relationship from mandatory disclosure. A fiduciary relationship is one in which a person trusts the other person to exercise a reasonable degree of care. CBSE argued that it holds the answer sheets in a fiduciary relationship with the examiner and so it can refuse to divulge that information. The Court did not agree and said that it is bound to allow RTI applicants to inspect or obtain a copy of their answer sheets. But the Court admitted that if a disgruntled examinee comes to know the name of the examiner, he may harm the examiner. So it said that before giving the answer sheets to the RTI applicant, information about the examiners should be deleted under section 8(1)(g) of RTI Act, on the ground that if such information is disclosed, it may endanger their physical safety.

Sec. 8(3) of the RTI Act says that information relating to any event or matter which took place 20 years before the RTI application should be provided. At first sight, it appears that this section makes it compulsory to preserve all information for 20 years. But the Supreme Court interpreted it differently in its order. It said that examination bodies need not keep the answer sheets for 20 years and can make their own rules about how long they will keep them (for example, CBSE rules say that answer sheets will be kept for 3 months after the announcing of results). The RTI applicant has to submit his application for answer sheets within this time or else RTI Act will not apply.

P.M. Bhat, Mysore Grahakara Parishat

Photos from the December issue of Grahaka Patrike

 (B.V.Shenoy)
The EXCEL plant established to process the solid waste produced by Mysore city is not working properly. There are hills of unprocessed garbage everywhere

 (B.V.Shenoy)
There are hundreds of bags of compost manure remaining unsold at the EXCEL plant.

(Bhamy V.Shenoy)
The November monthly meeting of MGP discussed the Master Plan-2031 for the Mysore-Nanjangud planning area.

Sub-registrar's offices have been streamlined

The department of stamps and registration is streamlining all its offices  To check its progress, a delegation from Mysore Grahakara Parishat recently visited the Mysore (South) Sub-registrar's office (opposite People's Park) which is presently manned by sub-registrars M.V. Satheesh and H.T. Shashikala. The senior sub-registrar M.V. Satheesh showed the delegation around and explained the various facets of the office streamlining. It was noticed that the documents held by the office such as various types of deeds (wills, gifts, leases, sales, partitions, etc.) dealing with property, general powers of attorney, marriage documents, etc. have been neatly sorted and catalogued so that they can be retrieved quickly. Records from the year 2003 onwards have been digitized and can be retrieved almost instantaneously. We were told that the department is considering a proposal to digitize even records before 2003 and if it happens, the office will be completely digitized. Digitization has speeded up considerably the services provided by the office. For example, "no encumbrance certificates" for the period after 2003 can now be provided within a day.

A.M. Subba Rao, Mysore Grahakara Parishat