Orissa High Court directs SBI to pay Rs 1 lakh to customer for not returning documents after loan recovery

Cuttack, Nov 26:  The Orissa High Court has directed the State Bank of India (SBI) to pay Rs 1 lakh as compensation to a person for not returning his documents after loan recovery.

The High Court also directed the bank to return the original or duplicate documents to the petitioner within one month.

The petitioner had cleared his loan under a one-time settlement (OTS) scheme 14 years back, but the original documents of his mortgaged property ownership had not been returned till date.

Hearing the petition, the single judge bench of Justice SK Panigrahi ruled, “Once the loan was resolved, there was no legal reason for the bank to withhold the return of the title deed (mortgaged documents), regardless of the pending litigation. Therefore, the refusal to return the document is unjustifiable.”

“In light of the petitioner’s advanced age and the significant difficulties he is facing in retrieving the documents despite no fault of his own, this court directs the bank to pay him Rs 1 lakh as compensation within 30 days from the date of presentation of a copy of this judgment,” Justice Panigrahi specified.

The High Court issued the direction recently hearing a petition filed by 70-year-old Sujit Kumar Ghosh who had alleged that the original property documents had not been returned despite his persistence, including frequent personal visits and countless letters.

The petitioner also sought direction to the bank authorities to pay Rs 5000 per day to him from the date of issuance of the ‘No Due Certificate’ for the delay in returning the mortgaged documents.

According to case records, Sujit Kumar Ghosh had availed a loan of Rs 72,000 from a SBI branch in Cuttack in 1986. His loan account became NPA after he failed to pay the loan EMIs in time following which the bank initiated a loan recovery case before a local court in Cuttack.

Later, while the case was pending in court, the bank settled the loan outstanding dues at Rs 1,06,337 under one-time settlement scheme (OTS) on July 26, 2010 and issued the “No Due Certificate” on December 24, 2010.