Gold gone from locker

A Behala homemaker who found jewellery worth more than Rs 5 lakh missing from her bank locker last week has since been trying in vain to get the authorities to accept responsibility and police to start a probe.

Ranita Bandyopadhyay, who lost all the jewellery that her parents had gifted her at the time of her wedding, said officials of the Sarsuna branch of United Bank of India (UBI) had accused her of leaving the safe open during her previous visit to locker No. 87 while the police were refusing to register an FIR.

“I went to deposit two bangles on March 2 and was shocked to find the locker open. Over 300gm of gold jewellery that I had kept there was also gone. All that remained were a few documents. When I went to the police, they registered a general diary instead of an FIR,” Ranita, the wife of a senior CESC official, said.

Bank officials tried passing the buck by harping on the possibility of Ranita, 36, not locking the safe properly when she last entered the room on 23 December. But experts in locker-safety systems said it would not have been possible for a customer to take out the key without locking the safe properly.

“If the customer had the key with her when she came to open the safe, it is certain that the locker was closed during the last operation. The key would not have come out had the locker not been closed,” said Debasish Dutta, the locker in-charge of a branch of the Union Bank of India.

The locker room at UBI’s Sarsuna branch is not under CCTV surveillance.

The official word from UBI is that an internal probe has just been completed and the report submitted to the head office. Officers of Thakurpukur police station claimed to be awaiting the outcome of the bank’s investigation to launch their probe. “Bank officials requested us not to take action before they finished their inquiry,” said an officer.

A senior manager of UBI said he was confident the internal probe panel would give the branch a clean chit. “The locker-in-charge accompanies the customer to the room and both need to insert their respective keys simultaneously to open the safe. But the locker holder can close the safe alone after putting or taking out something. We think the lady failed to close the locker,” he added.

The official, however, failed to explain why the mandatory evening check didn’t reveal an open safe on 23 December itself. Retired teacher Pradip Bhattacharya and homemaker Anima Dutta had lodged similar complaints against two banks last year. Neither received compensation.

“A bank’s liability arises if it is proved that the locker was broken or its keys were tampered with, and the articles went missing because of that,” said a senior law officer of Allahabad Bank.


The Telegraph Metro