Empty Bank Locker, Broken Trust — Banks Must Take Responsibility
The Issue
We trusted the bank with three generations of gold. The locker was empty.
On 28 July 2026, my 74-year-old mother watched PNB officials drill open locker A-46 at Railway Road, Old Faridabad — the locker our family has operated for 12 years with the same key. It opened in under a minute. There was nothing inside.
Gone was 148.5 g of gold and 7 antique silver coins dating back to 1904 — passed from my grandmother's hands to my mother's, valued at ₹18,02,000 in FIR No. 206/2026. In India, jewellery is not an investment line-item. It is a mother's wedding gift; the ornaments gifted at my wife's wedding; the pieces set aside for my daughters — heritage meant to be passed on, hand to hand, the one thing families protect through every hardship. She put it in a bank vault for exactly one reason: she believed nothing in India was safer than a bank locker.
And the lock itself tells a story. A week earlier, on 21 July, our key — the key that had opened this locker for twelve years — suddenly would not turn. The bank's own master key turned normally. A lever lock does not forget its own key while the master key still works, unless the lock or its levers were interfered with. The bank's own letter of 28 July records the empty locker and lists the ornaments. Yet we were asked not to take the matter outside the bank, and to this day no officer senior to the branch manager — the very official within the scope of the enquiry — has responded to us.
This is not one family's misfortune — it is a pattern.
Bengaluru, 2025: a woman reported ~145 g of jewellery missing from her SBI locker; police booked bank officials. Faridabad itself, just six months before us: the Economic Offences Wing arrested two bank managers and a locksmith in the Sector-15 locker case — and a locker complaint has also been reported from the PNB Sector-15A branch in Faridabad. Solan: police invoked the banker breach-of-trust law after a PNB locker was found open. Chandigarh: a consumer court ordered PNB to pay ₹1 crore. Multiple PNB and SBI locker theft/fraud cases have been reported across branches in recent years — yet the government told Parliament that public-sector banks recorded only 40 "established" locker-theft cases in the last five years, and "zero" in FY 2025-26, because only cases the banks themselves admit are counted. The victims whose banks dispute them — families like ours — are counted nowhere. The Supreme Court, in Amitabha Dasgupta v. United Bank of India (2021), laid down 15 principles precisely because banks kept disowning responsibility for lockers.
Why this matters to every family reading this. Crores of Indian families keep their life's earnings as jewellery in bank lockers believing it is safe. It is not. RBI caps bank liability at 100× the annual rent — barely ₹1.5–2 lakh against generations of gold. CCTV is kept only 180 days. Handwritten registers can be lost or altered. Lock forensics — the one science that could prove tampering — is a specialised skill most police units are neither trained nor equipped for. So the bank points to the police, the police move slowly against the bank, and most locker-theft cases are never resolved. Where does a common citizen go? That question deserves an answer before this happens to the next family.
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The Issue
We trusted the bank with three generations of gold. The locker was empty.
On 28 July 2026, my 74-year-old mother watched PNB officials drill open locker A-46 at Railway Road, Old Faridabad — the locker our family has operated for 12 years with the same key. It opened in under a minute. There was nothing inside.
Gone was 148.5 g of gold and 7 antique silver coins dating back to 1904 — passed from my grandmother's hands to my mother's, valued at ₹18,02,000 in FIR No. 206/2026. In India, jewellery is not an investment line-item. It is a mother's wedding gift; the ornaments gifted at my wife's wedding; the pieces set aside for my daughters — heritage meant to be passed on, hand to hand, the one thing families protect through every hardship. She put it in a bank vault for exactly one reason: she believed nothing in India was safer than a bank locker.
And the lock itself tells a story. A week earlier, on 21 July, our key — the key that had opened this locker for twelve years — suddenly would not turn. The bank's own master key turned normally. A lever lock does not forget its own key while the master key still works, unless the lock or its levers were interfered with. The bank's own letter of 28 July records the empty locker and lists the ornaments. Yet we were asked not to take the matter outside the bank, and to this day no officer senior to the branch manager — the very official within the scope of the enquiry — has responded to us.
This is not one family's misfortune — it is a pattern.
Bengaluru, 2025: a woman reported ~145 g of jewellery missing from her SBI locker; police booked bank officials. Faridabad itself, just six months before us: the Economic Offences Wing arrested two bank managers and a locksmith in the Sector-15 locker case — and a locker complaint has also been reported from the PNB Sector-15A branch in Faridabad. Solan: police invoked the banker breach-of-trust law after a PNB locker was found open. Chandigarh: a consumer court ordered PNB to pay ₹1 crore. Multiple PNB and SBI locker theft/fraud cases have been reported across branches in recent years — yet the government told Parliament that public-sector banks recorded only 40 "established" locker-theft cases in the last five years, and "zero" in FY 2025-26, because only cases the banks themselves admit are counted. The victims whose banks dispute them — families like ours — are counted nowhere. The Supreme Court, in Amitabha Dasgupta v. United Bank of India (2021), laid down 15 principles precisely because banks kept disowning responsibility for lockers.
Why this matters to every family reading this. Crores of Indian families keep their life's earnings as jewellery in bank lockers believing it is safe. It is not. RBI caps bank liability at 100× the annual rent — barely ₹1.5–2 lakh against generations of gold. CCTV is kept only 180 days. Handwritten registers can be lost or altered. Lock forensics — the one science that could prove tampering — is a specialised skill most police units are neither trained nor equipped for. So the bank points to the police, the police move slowly against the bank, and most locker-theft cases are never resolved. Where does a common citizen go? That question deserves an answer before this happens to the next family.
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Petition created on 3 August 2026