Why Indians kill themselves?

Recently there have been two incidents dealing with services provided by indian companies which caused unnecessary frusturation. Two sectors: banking and mobile services have said to cause a revolution in India. But at the ground level if one sees how they operate, a common man still feels frusturated.

Today morning, I went to ICICI bank branch in South Delhi for opening a savings account. I thought it should have been pretty simple, but that's what added to my woes. I was shocked to know that ICICI doesn't open a bank account unless one doesn't have account in another bank in the same city. They need a cheque from one of my another bank account in New Delhi. But since I don't belong to Delhi and am only living there from last 6 months, I cannot open a bank account unless I first open a bank account in another bank. They won't take cash, won't take an outstation cheque and don't have any other mechanism in place. I was ready to give any kind of authentication proof, but no solution.

And when I asked the concerned person, "Isn't it ridiculous?" And he just gave a meeky smile and said "Yeah".

This is the state of indian services and we boast even of that. I remember opening a bank account in Austria, took 5 minutes and they didn't even take a single penny, not even a photograph!

Last Week, I had this another unique experience of taking a mobile connection from one of India's famous mobile providers - Airtel. The connection is an Instant Postpaid connection enabling both prepaid and postpaid facilities. I made 6-7 calls during the week ahead to enquire the status of activation of my postpaid connection. But the customer care over there is as bad as it can be. Sometimes I feel they have been just made to sit over there without any knowledge. They just want to bang the call down as fast as possible. My dual prepaid+postpaid connection resulted in double woes. Now the Airtel customer care has been divided into two parts - where one number is only for prepaid customers and another number is for postpaid customers. Companies are trying to have a single window and they already fragmented their stuff. And the two different customer care's won't even answer any query which is mean't for the other customer care.

And with Instant Postpaid, I had an experience where the postpaid customer care asked me to contact prepaid one and when I dialled the prepaid customer care, they asked me to contact postpaid one. That's the height!!!

And kind of responses I got from customer care, when I enquired about the status of activation on the 8th day (activation is done within 5 days) were totally amusing. One person said, it takes 7 days to activate, there were 3-4 holidays, so "wait another week". I mean why are you trying to fool the customer! I asked him, isn't it 5 days? And then he said yeah, but holidays. And there weren't those many holidays, just a weekend. I asked him to number the holidays.

And getting GPRS activation over it was another headache, my first call's reponse was: activation after 4 hours, second call: said 1 hour, third call said another 4 hours - try tomorrow. And even next day they had their problems. Finally got it working by lunch time.

We people boast a lot but ground realities are quite different. We provide lot of 24X7 services to US consumers but why can't we provide efficient services for indian consumers!