Taking home loan for your dream house, Take care of your property documents

Every body has a dream to have their own house and to fulfill this dream we take a loan from the bank. But there is a need to take care of the property papers after taking home loan from the bank.

Recently there has been a case where the lender bank misplaced the property papers of one of their customer.

Sudhir Bawa had taken a home loan from a multinational bank and repaid it, but when he wanted the original sale deed papers back from the bank he was told that his property papers were lost.

Bawa, consultant with an international pharmaceutical company, told IANS, "I had taken Rs 9,00,000 as home loan from HSBC Bank in Connaught Place in 2000. By 2002 I had repaid the loan. But the bank apprised me that the original sale deed papers were lost ".

The bank shrugs off the matter from their shoulders by lodging an FIR at the Connaught Place police station.

Bawa added, "They informed me by a letter and then merely registered an FIR. However, they refused to compensate me for the loss caused by the bank's carelessness. If the documents get into the wrong hands they can easily be misused.”

Ultimately Bawa sell off his property at a lower price, bearing a loss of over Rs 10 lakh as he did not have the original papers of his property.

"This is sheer negligence on the part of the bank and they are liable to compensate the loan applicant," said lawyer Manjeet Singh Ahluwalia.

Lawyers handling consumer matters also agree that though such cases are not the average cases, banks are unwilling to pay compensation to the aggrieved.

"Banks are generally not inclined to compensate the loan applicant, leaving him with no recourse but to move court. This unnecessarily adds to the backlog of cases," said Sugriv Dubey, a lawyer.

Though last year, the State Consumer Commission had slapped a fine of Rs 500,000 on Citibank for misplacing the original documents of the property of Prem Narain Gupta.

Gupta, a resident of east Delhi, had taken a loan of about Rs 7,00,000 for renovation of his property valued about Rs 1.5 crore in 2001.

"Once a service provider resorts to such a procedure that a loan applicant has to deposit the original deed and not the certified copies of the title deed, he has to exercise utmost care and caution in the safe preservation of documents," the commission had said in its order.