Reliance Net Connect - The effing saga continues...

The dead and forgotten - or at least, what I had hoped was d and effing f - won't remain so. And my poor, old mother is bearing the brunt of it. You are aware of my Reliance misadventure. Well, it refuses to go away and leave us in piece.

Soon after my last update, my mother started receiving phone calls from the Billing/Collections Department of Reliance Communications, stating that there were unpaid monthly bills against her name, amounting to Rs. 600/= or more.

During all those calls, she painstakingly explained every time to the person(s) calling, that we could not use the device and returned it to the store long back, and they had already deducted Rs. 650/= towards a month’s rent and other charges. However, the calls did not stop, and fresh bills kept arriving.

Finally, someone from Reliance Customer Care advised her to go to some Reliance Communications office - it appeared quite shady to me; apparently it is a 'termination center' - at 36, GC Avenue, Kolkata – 13 (Chandni Chowk for the cognoscenti), and fill out some form with some ‘termination request number’ 67625808.

This morning, however, some arsehole called Roychaudhury from the Reliance Collections department called my mother, and bloody threatened her with dire consequences if she did not ‘pay up’!

I was so shocked at this extremely reprehensible behaviour that I didn't know what to do. We found to our dismay and chagrin that no one in Reliance Customer care was really willing to solve this issue without trying to extract even more money from us, for a service that we could not use in the first place.

You can imagine, my friends, how extremely difficult it is for my aged parents to be placed in such an embarrassing situation for no fault of ours, and to be harassed continuously by uncouth individuals working for Reliance. We were already disillusioned with the lack of service from Reliance Communications. And now Reliance was doing us this great disservice by engaging such predatory tactics.

My mother is going to the Chandni Chawk office today. I have already written to the Nodal Officer of Reliance Customer care in Kolkata, the Customer center at their Bombay office, and to the Department of Telecommunications Public Grievances cell in Delhi. I am not very hopeful about it, but I don't know what else to do. I wish there were something like a Better Business Bureau in India; I probably would have to follow my friend Roddur's advice and approach the Consumer Redressal Forum.

I hope none of you ever have the misfortune of having to deal with these thugs and scoundrels.