u/Tricky_Bus1622

😫intlo ela manage cheyali ippudu??

evarikainaa interest unda future lo??

Nenu vadi prema ane mayalo padipoyana? Eh feeling different ga undi...

Parents emotional blackmail cheste marriage ki oppukuntaaraa???

RBI's Master Direction requires banks to use Hindi, English, and the local state language (Telugu, in my case) on signage, forms, passbooks, and customer communication in non Hindi speaking states.

In practice, across Visakhapatnam district, most bank branches only use Hindi and English. Telugu, the actual language spoken by the people the branch serves is missing.

I didn't just complain and move on. Over the last few months I :

Filed an RTI asking RBI what enforcement action it has taken on trilingual compliance in the district.

Got a reply that dodged the substance, so I filed a First Appeal.

The First Appeal was dismissed by RBI in late June 2026 again without addressing the core compliance failure.

I'm now preparing a Second Appeal to the Central Information Commission (CIC), which has to be filed within 90 days of the First Appeal order. Beyond that, there's a real legal path here: the Calcutta High Court already ruled on this exact issue for Bengali (the Bangla Pokkho Charitable Trust case), ordering banks to comply with trilingual norms. That precedent is directly transferable to Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, or any other non-Hindi state language, this isn't a one-state problem. If the CIC route doesn't produce real change, a Writ of Mandamus under Article 226 in the AP High Court is the next step to legally compel compliance.

Separately, an AIBEA circular on Local Language Proficiency Test (LLPT) reforms for bank staff backs up the same point: language compliance in banking is a recognized, unresolved systemic issue, not a one-branch oversight.

I also filed a specific complaint against a so called Bank, and it shows exactly how banks try to get away with token compliance. Their "resolution" was to just reprint the withdrawal and deposit slips in three languages — and then mark the complaint as closed. Signage, account opening forms, passbooks, loan documents, and every other customer-facing document are all still Hindi-and-English only. Changing one slip is not compliance with the Master Direction; it's a box-ticking exercise designed to close the complaint on paper without fixing the actual problem. This is exactly the kind of partial, cosmetic fix that RBI needs to be called out for accepting.

Why this matters beyond language pride: a huge number of bank customers, especially my father who is a telugu literate, older people, students from Telugu medium backgrounds and those less comfortable in English or Hindi can't fully understand forms, loan terms, or passbook entries in their own bank. That's a real access to banking problem, not just a symbolic one.

Has anyone else pursued this in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, West Bengal, or elsewhere? Did RBI actually act on your complaint, or did you also hit a wall? What should I do now? I can't file complaints on each and every bank right?

(Polished by AI)