The National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission has clarified how the Reserve Bank of India's 2021 revised guidelines on safe deposit lockers apply where the loss of locker contents is traced to the bank's own security lapse, rather than a genuinely unforeseeable event such as a natural calamity. A locker-holder, Priya Ramanathan, had discovered valuables missing from her locker with a branch of a private bank, and the branch's own CCTV logs showed unsupervised, unauthorised access to the locker room over a weekend due to a lapse in the bank's dual-custody protocol.
The bank argued that RBI's framework caps a bank's liability for locker contents at 100 times the annual locker rent, and that this cap applies uniformly regardless of the cause of loss. The Commission disagreed, holding that the capped liability framework is intended for losses arising from events genuinely beyond the bank's control, such as fire, theft by a third party despite adequate bank safeguards, or building collapse, and does not shield a bank whose own negligence, such as a documented breach of its dual-custody and access-control protocols, directly enabled the loss.
Because the loss here was traceable to the bank's own established security lapse rather than an external, unforeseeable event, the Commission held the cap inapplicable and directed compensation based on the locker-holder's reasonably substantiated claim as to the contents, subject to standard evidentiary safeguards against inflated claims.