Quite sometime ago I had seen this on someone's T-shirt : "My Dad is an ATM." Good joke, but looking at most of our ATMs in Karnataka (like the one in the pic), I feel most Dads in our state still have long time left before real ATMs replaced them! Why? Because the ATMs in our state are hard to use and employ an alien language even today. Shockingly, this Bangalore ATM believes it has given its users a language choice!
The Indian government, under the Rajbhasha prerogative, regulates the national bank, RBI, to instruct all Scheduled Commercial Banks of India to follow a language policy in their operations; a policy fleshed in Hindi but clothed by the fabric of consumer welfare. Now, where in the democratic world, running a market economy, would a government regulate banks to use a particular language in their functions, operate their ATMs in a particular language? What such banking regulation and packaged goods rules prove is the existence of scrupulous efforts of Indian policy makers in spreading the blanket of Hindi imposition as wide across the society as possible. And all this, at the cost of every commoner's hard-earned money.
That a consumer's language has been exiled and replaced by Hindi in these ATMs is not the only concern here. The biggest concern is really about the customers' wallets! A concern about dwindling funds of customers when banks end up having to make unnecessary expenditure towards upkeep of all those Hindi implementation programs in their operations; programs while seldom serving any purpose to a majority of customers in India, has also caused harm in many an occasion. Of course that doesn't include stray incidents of losses customers incurred because of faulty transactions due to miscommunication and language mismatch! In a time when every Rupee is considered valuable in investing towards a better future, each such Rupee wasted because of such language policy is but a wastage of people's hard earned money and a crime no less.
The question we as citizens need to ask (ourselves first) is 'did we elect a government so that they could spend our moneys on imposing an alien language such as Hindi on us?' If not should the government not stop elevating Hindi as opposed to our language in banks in our own locality too?
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| A HDFC ATM in Bangalore (Photo taken in Jun '09) |
That a consumer's language has been exiled and replaced by Hindi in these ATMs is not the only concern here. The biggest concern is really about the customers' wallets! A concern about dwindling funds of customers when banks end up having to make unnecessary expenditure towards upkeep of all those Hindi implementation programs in their operations; programs while seldom serving any purpose to a majority of customers in India, has also caused harm in many an occasion. Of course that doesn't include stray incidents of losses customers incurred because of faulty transactions due to miscommunication and language mismatch! In a time when every Rupee is considered valuable in investing towards a better future, each such Rupee wasted because of such language policy is but a wastage of people's hard earned money and a crime no less.
The question we as citizens need to ask (ourselves first) is 'did we elect a government so that they could spend our moneys on imposing an alien language such as Hindi on us?' If not should the government not stop elevating Hindi as opposed to our language in banks in our own locality too?
