Kolkata :
Inside the underground chambers of a non-descript office building on BBD Bag’s Netaji Subhas Road, lies a piece of Kolkata’s banking history. Here, in the basement of the four-storeyed structure, constructed by a Gujarati entrepreneur in 1940, Kolkata had one of its first private vaults — The Calcutta Safe Deposit Vault.
In the absence of locker facilities in banks then, it was a huge success with British citizens and business families. Seventy-five years later, the vault — probably the only privately owned one in Kolkata now — still survives.
Spread across 5,000 sqft, the vault has an astounding 8,600 lockers and three strongrooms. Dozens of safes, chests and almirahs, some of which are nearly a century-old, take up space in the strongrooms. Several lockers are still in the name of foreigners who rented them three generations ago. Around 2,000 of these lockers are now ‘dead’ and their holders are untraceable.
But the rest are active, says Sriram Ojha, a member of the board of management that runs the vault.
“We still have clients in USA, UK, Singapore and Canada, apart from all corners of the country. While many have stopped getting in touch with us, the rest are active users of the vault. They have been using it over generations and are keen to carry on. We are delighted to serve them because they are helping to keep this vault alive. It is part of our city’s great history,” Ojha said.
It was his father Amritlal Ojha, a successful industrialist from Kutch in Gujarat who started the vault in a building constructed by him. People like industrialists Badridas Goenka and Nalini Ranjan Sarkar attended the inauguration in January, 1940. It charged clients just Rs 8 every three months for a locker.
Four years later, on October 18, 1944, Amritlal passed away.
“My father had travelled to England to secure permission for the vault and building, which had been denied initially. He was on the board of more than a dozen companies and also president of the Indian Chamber of Commerce and FICCI at New Delhi, apart from numerous other business organizations. He enjoyed a tremendous goodwill in the elite circles of Kolkata, which made it easy for Calcutta Safe Deposit Vault to continue even after his death. Our clients never left us,” Ojha said.
Among those who stored valuables at the vault were the Dalai Lama and the Maharaja of Burdwan. Members of the royal family of Sikkim and the Tata and Birla families still hold some, apart from numerous other rich, aristocratic families in the city. Many of them still visit the vault regularly.
Fresh applications for lockers are still received, though there is hardly any available now. Recently, a client opened a locker that had not been operated for nearly 30 years — a Bengali woman from Texas claimed her husband’s trunk from a strongroom at the vault.
Reminders are sent to old clients to come and check their belongings. “Many respond enthusiastically while others are returned to us for the recipients are either dead or have shifted residence,” Ojha explained.
It is more to carry on his father’s legacy, than anything else, that the vault has been kept running with a workforce of only 20, said the 71-year-old Ojha. “None of his other businesses survive so I am keen that this one exists at least till I am alive. It is a hand-to-mouth existence for the vault since we have hundreds of defaulters. Charges have been revised but the earnings are still not enough to result in a decent profit. But we can still survive,” Ojha said.
There is a set of Reserve Bank of India guidelines for nationalized Bank lockers. But Ojha is not aware of them and he has not been questioned either.
“When my father started it, there was no RBI. But a demand for lockers must have existed as this vault was a runaway success. Our vault is not the only one in the country, there are several others in other cities. But ours was a huge hit,” he argues.
The vault now charges between Rs 800 and Rs 3,000 annually for a loc-ker, depending on its size. The char-ges for renting an almirah, a safe or a trunk are Rs 12,000, Rs 15,000 and Rs 5,000 respectively.
What worries Ojha now is the future. “Rent from the building sustains the company but the major tenant has been defaulting. Unless we can generate more revenue, the vault will pass into history. It sustains nearly a hundred people, which makes it important for me to ensure that it goes on,” Ojha explains.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Kolkata / by Prithvijit Mitra, TNN / September 13th, 2015