If you think it's crazy for this lone lawyer to have gone through this crusade, keep in mind that Indian Railways fought in a 100 hearings for ~25 cents, and their lawyers don't work for free. How bonkers is that?
I called customer care and asked if they could delete my account. They said, and I quote, "due to RBI regulations, we can't". Naturally, I asked "which regulation document? do you have a number?". The other person did not have an answer and escalated my call. They said they would get back to me and in the meantime, I read all the regulations there were. The regulations clearly stated that issuers shall give an option to close the account at any time. There was no such option in the app.
I pressed again to close the account to prevent misuse and/or fraud. The person on the other end of the call asked me (beratingly) to logout and delete the app. Because it was the same as deleting the account. I argued that it is not the same thing. To which his tone was more or less like, [my words, this is how it sounded] "you blithering idiot, you blasphemous imbecile, do you know how miniscule you are in the grand scheme of things. I am God here and you should bow down to my superiority and accept my solution"
I wonder if I should have sued.
This man is a hero! As he says, it is not about the money
Indian legal battles stretch for so long that many times people die without hearing a judgement for the case but my granddad was lucky enough to get the house back a few years before he died.
They fight tiny battles and when they win, they benefit everyone.
The political leadership could easily find solutions to stop such abuses of the public legal system, and direct resources to high priority cases with large public impact. By deliberately allowing such cases to bog down the justice system and waste limited public resources, they ensure rule of law cannot operate effectively. It's a typical story.
Most interesting tidbit for me. Is this really true?
Most of the paper work(judiciary / non judiciary) involves similar template , SSH/SSA , agreements etc. It need not be this complex. Most of the manual work involved in the process should be automated
The length of the battle comes from an overcrowded judicial system which has many reasons like this to be overcrowded via constraint of supply.
Supply constraint mechanisms are a way for labour to extract value from society. It happens with the AMA here and the judiciary there.
There needs to be some sort of common sense oversight in the Raliways (and most probably in other Indian government organizations also).
Also I wonder on what grounds the Railways was fighting on? The prices of the tickets are well known and widely published, and even though they do change over time, a lawyer like Chaturvedi would have kept all documentation.
courts in india have like 100 year backlog or something crazy amount. reason? i get the whole "principle" thing but get in line.
because of "principled people" like this man, inmates incarcerated for 10+ years without a trial are being delayed because once admitted, each case has to be completed to the full and these shall i say "worthless petty cases" are one of the causes of delay. want to know how much delay? apparently the case, over 22 years had over 100 hearing. that means, the 100 times the court was in session, some other case got pushed back, just a tiny bit but over 100 times, that counts to a lot.
now, i am not saying people should not fight for "principle" but when you are being pompous assholes for fighting over pennies while innocent men and women are being subjected to horrendous conditions in indian jails or thousands of victims of sexual crimes or other more serious issue, these principled people are causing the delay.
why dont you do arbitration whereby you go outside the traditional court system and fight your battles however long you like. why are they holding up courts?
You have to value your time and energy. 22 years of hearings for such a small amount of money really isn't worth it.
There was a time in my life when I would probably have fought this on principle, but I value my time a lot more now.
In London our transport network is managed by TFL. Their website lets you search for routes, and in the route options you can go for the fastest route, or choose this option: "Routes with the least changes". Every year on the same date, I would contact them and ask them to change that to "Routes with the fewest changes" and they would respond with something to the effect of "thanks for the feedback, passed it on, go away now".
I think I did this for over 10 years until one day it did get changed on their site. They did accompany it with a greater set of changes, that made the results more convoluted with pointless waypoints that clutter the results, but that's a new matter to pursue.