A forum to fight dud cheques, without pinching the pockets

Life is such that if you do a good deed, it may not come back to you, but if you deposit a cheque, chances are that it just might. Receiving a bounced cheque is bad enough, but you begin to feel like a victim when you go to the court to fight the person who issued that dud cheque. That's why, though a lot of people are told that the judiciary is a 'pillar', at least 20 lakh Indians have come to realise that it's in fact a 'wall'. There are more than 2 million cases of bounced cheques, involving Rs 50,000 crore, pending in Indian courts. In Mumbai alone there are 1.5 victims of dud cheques who are knocking at the doors of the judiciary to recover over Rs 6,000 crore. And most of these people eventually don't get justice. Worse, they give work to lawyers—it's believed that 50 per cent of the lawyers in Mumbai are dependent on bounced cheques cases alone. And if you are the litigant, it's even worse—an attempt at recovering Rs 1 lakh can cost you anywhere between Rs 15,000 and 20,000 in legal fee. That too only if you are lucky. Otherwise, you'd surely give up the fight somewhere down the dark corridors of the magistrate's court after years of running around and all those seemingly never-ending rounds of affidavits and counter-affidavits.

But there may be some hope for this wounded population, at last. Bounced Cheque Victims Grievances Forum is an organisation started about two years ago by three businessmen who had themselves realised that sometimes finding a cheque in the mailbox may not be pleasurable. Their aim: to make things less painful for the litigants by putting them on to handpicked lawyers who fight their cases for a very reasonable fee—just Rs 2,500 for amounts over Rs 5 lakh, Rs 2,000 for money between Rs 2-5 lakh, Rs 1,500 for an amount between Rs 2,5000 and Rs 2 lakh, and Rs 1,000 for money less than Rs 25,000. The lawyers are not part of the forum, thereby keeping the organisation clean from any monetary benefits.

Every day the forum gets over 20 frantic calls asking for help. Take, for instance, Prem Bahadur, a driver who wanted to recover Rs 1 lakh from a financial services company which defaulted on his hard-earned fixed deposit. Prem almost shelled out about Rs 15,000 as legal fee before he was told about the forum. It's been two years since he initiated legal proceedings against the company, but he's a happy man, because, thanks to the forum, he has only paid Rs 1,000 to the lawyer.

Says Vijay Agarwal, the forum's president: "Judges are normally very lenient to the accused who often pleads that he is not in a position to pay up. Also, there are so many cases pending that even if a litigant is lucky, he may recover his money only after a decade or more. You can simply forget about the interest after so many years. So, actually, issuing a dud cheque is a very profitable exercise for a culprit. They are happy if you go to court."

The forum, apart from saving the victims from paying enormous legal fees, also strives to create an awareness about the sheer inadequacy of the law in handling the issue of bounced cheques. It sends over 400 letters and faxes every month to the press, to the law department, the law minister and the chief justices of the Supreme Court and various high courts. The tone of most of these letters and faxes is invariably the same—to suggest various means to fight the monstrous system. Like a victim in Mumbai filing a case through a power-of-attorney in a court that is far away, in another state."Then the accused has to make the trip all the way there. It works sometimes. The accused pays up instead of running up and down," says Agarwal. The forum wants to impress upon these institutions that issuing dud cheques should entitle quicker and very severe penalties. Right now, jail sentences are rare.

Agarwal displays a letter from the chairman of the Law Commission, Jeevan Reddy that shows a positive response. He adds: "Law minister Arun Jaitley too has assured us that the government will soon make the required amendments in the law." The forum can be contacted at: Vijay Agarwal, Bounced Cheque Victims Grievances Forum, 301, Oriental house, 229, Samuel Street, Near Masjid Station (W), Mumbai 400 003, Tel: 3436653/3412207.