“The wearer knows where the shoe pinches, and the Bank is terribly remiss in the discharge of its duties.”

— National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, on a bank’s loss of a customer’s original title deed

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I. Case Snapshot: In Vogue Creations v. SBI (Bombay HC, 2026)

On 2 September 2026, a Division Bench of the Bombay High Court—Acting Chief Justice Ravindra V. Ghuge and Justice Gautam A. Ankhad—allowed a writ petition (No. 10241 of 2025, neutral citation 2026:BHC-AS:36037-DB) directing the State Bank of India to compensate a borrower at ₹5,000 per day for its admitted loss of original title documents deposited as security nearly half a century earlier.

• Facility availed in 1979; original agreements, share certificates (Units 317–318, Bussa Industrial Premises Co-op. Society, Prabhadevi, and a registered MIDC lease (Plot W-154, Taloja, Panvel) deposited as security.
• Loan fully repaid on 28 August 2003; a No Dues/No Claims Certificate followed only on 27 July 2023—nearly two decades later—whereupon SBI admitted the originals could not be traced.
• The Banking Ombudsman advised ₹1 lakh compensation (21 November 2024); SBI deposited it, but the borrower pressed for genuine reconstruction of title, not mere ex gratia payment.

The Court ordered ₹5,000/day from 1 December 2023 until certified copies and full reconstructed title records—endorsements, affidavits, and indemnities—are supplied, with the ₹1 lakh already paid adjusted against the running liability, and granted SBI twelve weeks to complete the exercise.

The Bench squarely rejected SBI’s plea that the borrower’s own delay of over fifteen years in seeking the documents should absolve the Bank.

The Court’s Observation on Bank Custody

As the Court put it:

A borrower who has fully discharged the loan is entitled to proceed on the legitimate assumption that the bank or a financial institution entrusted with the custody of valuable original title documents will maintain proper custody of those documents and return them upon discharge of the secured liability.

Internal administrative failures—branch shifting, staff turnover, file transfers to central record centers—were held to be risks the bank alone must bear; they furnish no defense against a borrower’s claim.

II. The RBI’s 2023 Circular: The 30-Day Rule and the ₹5,000/Day Metric

The judgment’s quantification rests on the RBI’s 13 September 2023 Circular on “Responsible Lending Conduct — Release of Movable/Immovable Property Documents on Repayment/Settlement of Personal Loans.” Its operative mandates for regulated entities are:

• Release within 30 days of full repayment or settlement, together with removal of charges registered with any registry (CERSAI, ROC, or otherwise).
• Compensation for delay attributable to the RE, at ₹5,000 per day of delay.
• Where the originals are lost or damaged, the RE must assist in obtaining duplicate or certified copies, bear all associated costs, and pay delay compensation—with an additional 30 days permitted for reconstruction before the daily penalty resumes running.
• Temporal reach: the directions apply only where the release obligation arises on or after 1 December 2023.

Because the underlying loan in In Vogue Creations was repaid in 2003, the Bombay High Court declined to apply the Circular retrospectively to that date. It instead treated 1 December 2023 as the trigger for the daily penalty, reasoning that the bank’s continuing failure to reconstruct title thereafter constituted a fresh, continuing wrong falling squarely within the circular’s temporal window—a formulation likely to recur in future litigation over decades-old deposits.

III. Citation Table

IV. The Precedential Architecture

A. The NCDRC Line on Custodial Negligence

Long before the 2023 Circular gave the principle a rupee figure, the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission had already built a consistent line holding banks strictly to their custodial obligations over title deeds pledged as security.

In Citi Bank & Ors. v. Ramesh Kalyan Durg & Ors. (2016), the NCDRC held that a bank whose custody failure caused loss of original documents must bear the cost of publication notices, obtain certified copies at its own expense, and additionally indemnify the complainant against any future prejudice—a three-part remedial template (copies, cost-shifting, and indemnity) that recurs in every later decision on the point.

The same year, in Bank of India v. Mustafa Ibrahim Nadiadwala, the Commission articulated the underlying rationale with particular clarity: the value of mortgaged property is inescapably depressed once its original title deed is lost, regardless of how complete the certified copies later supplied may be. That reasoning has since been cited in almost every subsequent title-deed-loss complaint, including by the complainant in Manoj Madhusudhanan.

In State Bank of India v. Amitesh Mazumdar (2020), the NCDRC upheld a West Bengal State Commission award of ₹5 lakh compensation plus ₹30,000 costs, together with directions to lodge an FIR and publish the loss in three newspapers—rejecting the bank’s offer of certified copies and an indemnity as a substitute for monetary compensation. Presiding Member V.K. Jain’s observation there anticipates the language later borrowed for this treatise’s epigraph: no purchaser or future lender will readily deal with a property once it is known that the original title deed cannot be produced.

In State Bank of India v. Jatinder Pal Singh (2023)—on facts strikingly close to In Vogue Creations—the Bank argued that the shifting of records to a centralized Stressed Assets Resolution Centre explained, and excused, the loss. The NCDRC rejected this, holding that reasonable steps to preserve the deeds were not taken and that the bank’s internal reorganization could not be visited upon the borrower. The Bombay High Court’s later refusal, in In Vogue Creations, to accept branch-shifting as a defense is a direct doctrinal descendant of this reasoning.

Most recently, in Manoj Madhusudhanan v. ICICI Bank Ltd. (2023), the NCDRC awarded ₹25 lakh compensation plus ₹50,000 costs where a courier engaged by the bank lost title documents in transit to a central storage facility. The Commission held the bank—not its courier—solely liable, reasoning that custodial responsibility under the loan agreement was non-delegable and could not be diluted by outsourcing physical transit to a third party whose contractual liability was, in any event, capped at a nominal sum. This decision closes an obvious escape route: a bank cannot point to a courier, a records vendor, or any other agent to dilute its custodial duty.

B. The Maintainability Counter-Current: Limitation and Commercial Purpose

A less borrower-friendly line tempers the picture, and a competent practitioner must reckon with it before choosing a forum.

In A. C. Dharmadevi v. Indian Bank & 2 Ors. (2024), the NCDRC set aside a State Commission’s award where the underlying loan had financed a family tobacco business. Even though the bank’s negligence in losing the deeds was not seriously disputed, the complaint failed on two independent grounds: first, the transaction was “commercial” within the meaning of Section 2(1)(d) of the Consumer Protection Act and so fell outside consumer jurisdiction altogether; second, the complaint was filed some twenty years after the loss was first discovered, well beyond the two-year limitation prescribed by Section 24A, and the complainant’s intervening acquiescence—continuing to transact on the strength of certified copies—was treated as compounding the delay. The Commission was, however, careful to preserve the complainant’s substantive remedy: it directed return of certified copies and a certificate clarifying title status, while leaving compensation to be pursued “in the appropriate forum.”

The commercial-purpose bar rests on firmer ground still after Shrikant G. Mantri v. Punjab National Bank, (2022) 5 SCC 42, where the Supreme Court held that a stockbroker’s overdraft facility, availed and repeatedly enhanced to expand his trading business, was a commercial transaction taking him outside the definition of “consumer” altogether—reaffirming that services availed “exclusively for earning livelihood by self-employment” are the only carve-out to the commercial-purpose exclusion. Read together, Dharmadevi and Mantri mean that a developer, trader, or business borrower whose loan financed commercial activity may find the consumer forum door closed on both limitation and maintainability grounds—precisely the two obstacles that In Vogue Creations sailed past by proceeding under Article 226 instead.

C. Post-Circular Application at the Consumer-Forum Level

The 2023 Circular’s ₹5,000/day metric has already migrated into consumer jurisprudence. In Somasekhar Gangarapu v. State Bank of India (2026), a Consumer Commission directed the bank to pay ₹5,000 per day from the date the loan was repaid until compliance, expressly invoking the Circular, and additionally awarded 18% interest per annum on the loan amount from the date of repayment—illustrating that the Circular’s daily-penalty formula is now treated as a floor, not a ceiling, on which consumer fora will layer conventional interest and cost awards.

D. Why In Vogue Creations Marks a Turning Point

Read against this backdrop, the significance of In Vogue Creations lies less in reaffirming that banks owe a custodial duty—that much the NCDRC had settled by 2016—than in demonstrating a forum strategy that avoids the twin traps exposed in Dharmadevi: limitation under Section 24A and the commercial-purpose exclusion. By proceeding under Article 226 rather than the Consumer Protection Act, the petitioner in In Vogue Creations was never required to explain a twenty-year gap to a limitation bar that has no true analogue in writ jurisdiction, nor to establish that its two industrial properties were held for “livelihood by self-employment.” The Bombay High Court’s willingness to treat the bank’s continuing failure to reconstruct title as a continuing wrong, freshly actionable from 1 December 2023, effectively converts what might elsewhere have been a stale claim into a live one.

V. Legal Principles Distilled

• Duty survives repayment. Once a secured liability is discharged, the bank retains no right to hold the title documents and comes under an affirmative duty to preserve and return them.
• The borrower’s delay does not excuse the bank. Internal record-keeping failures—branch shifting, staff changes, outsourced storage, or courier transit—are risks the bank alone bears; none of them shifts responsibility to the borrower for not asking sooner.
• Custodial duty is non-delegable. Engaging a courier, a records vendor, or a central storage facility does not dilute the bank’s liability; the contractual cap in a service-provider agreement binds the provider, not the customer.
• The RBI’s 2023 Circular is a benchmark, not a retrospective statute. Courts will not apply its ₹5,000/day formula to periods before 1 December 2023 but will readily apply it to a continuing failure to reconstruct title thereafter, even where the original deposit and loss predate the Circular by decades.
• Certified copies do not fully cure the loss of originals. Reconstruction must extend to endorsements, affidavits, and indemnities sufficient to restore marketable title—not a bare photocopy.
• Forum choice matters. Consumers for an import a two-year limitation period (Section 24A) and exclude transactions for a commercial purpose; writ jurisdiction under Article 226 against a public-sector bank may avoid both obstacles where the facts support treating the continuing denial of title documents as a continuing wrong.
• Ombudsman relief does not exhaust the remedy. An Ombudsman’s compensation award, and its acceptance (or even the bank’s unilateral deposit of it), does not extinguish a borrower’s right to pursue a fuller remedy before a court or consumer forum; the Circular itself preserves other available remedies.

VI. Practitioner’s Checklist: When the Bank Cannot Locate the Papers

1. Secure a written acknowledgment of loss from the bank, together with the No Dues/No Claims Certificate confirming the secured liability stands fully discharged.
2. Insist on an FIR and a newspaper publication of the loss—consumer fora have repeatedly treated these as standard, non-negotiable protective measures.
3. Approach the Banking Ombudsman for expedited interim relief, but preserve every piece of correspondence; an Ombudsman award is a floor, not a ceiling, on eventual compensation.
4. Invoke the RBI’s 2023 Circular by name and date to anchor a claim for delay compensation at ₹5,000/day, while being precise about which period (pre- or post-1 December 2023) the claim covers.
5. Before choosing a forum, test the transaction against Section 2(1)(d) of the Consumer Protection Act and Section 24A’s limitation clock; where either is doubtful, a writ petition against a public-sector bank may be the safer route, as In Vogue Creations illustrates.
6. Demand full title reconstruction—endorsements, affidavits, and indemnity bonds—not merely photocopies, and insist the bank bear every cost of that exercise.

VII. Closing Note

Vogue Creations does not announce a new principle so much as it completes one: a decade-long NCDRC line establishing that banks owe an unqualified, non-delegable custodial duty over title deeds has now been carried, via writ jurisdiction, past the limitation and maintainability defenses that periodically defeat that same principle in the consumer forum. For borrowers sitting on decades-old, undischarged custodial failures, the lesson of the last ten years of this jurisprudence is now reasonably settled: silence is not acquiescence, delay is not forfeiture, and the meter—once the Circular’s window opens—runs at the bank’s expense, not the borrower’s.

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