For four years, I went on telling all my friends that Global Trust Bank (GTB) is one of the best banks in the country. There was this impeccable smile that used to greet me whenever I visited this bank. Though I was not their biggest customers, they treated me like one.
But this afternoon I woke up to a rude shock when one of my friends called me up and informed me that RBI has imposed a moratorium for three months on GTB. I ran to the nearest branch in Hyderabad. There were scores of other customers with a forlorn look on their faces. The news is that customers may get their money back but no one is sure about this.
I parked all my savings in GTB. So you can imagine the trauma I?m undergoing now. I wonder why the customers are always at the receiving end. The RBI should have given a prior notice to the bank so that the hapless depositors would have withdrawn their money. The government says this ?effective close of business is done in the interest of public and depositors.? I cannot understand this statement. Just imagine the plight of hundreds of thousands of depositors who usually park all their savings with the bank. I?m hardly left with a rupee. I cannot understand how I?m going to survive for the next few months.
Banks like GTB should not be allowed to play all these games of inefficiency with the public money. The top brass who are responsible for such grace incompetencies of not meeting the RBI standards should be put behind the bars. There should be a mechanism that would forewarn customers so that they can take the necessary course of action instead of letting them woke up to a nightmare one sunny afternoon. I think it?s time people in the country should go for good old banks like State Bank of India.
--Murali Duggineni.