A Delhi borrower underwent Gamma Knife brain surgery at AIIMS in April 2024 and lost his employment days later. His mother, the owner of the mortgaged flat, suffered a stroke-warning event that August. They disclosed everything and asked Bajaj Housing Finance for a temporary moratorium — no waiver, no write-off, not one rupee of interest forgiven.
What followed, on the documents: an arbitration commenced through an arbitrator the lender appointed itself for a fee of ₹1,000, then quietly withdrawn. A written offer to place that arbitration "on hold" if he paid the regular EMI plus an additional 25%. A claim that his medical records had never been supplied — filed two days after they were served, with proof. And on 16 July 2026, a fortnight after his neurologist wrote that he must "avoid tension and anxiety" and "reduce stress from all activities", the blank security cheque he had handed over at disbursal in 2023 was filled in for ₹1,90,80,000 and sent to his bank. It bounced. He now faces criminal exposure over a figure he never wrote.
Two years on, he has still never received a decision on his request — not a sanction, not a reasoned refusal. This account is drawn largely from Bajaj Housing Finance's own written replies.
The borrower in this account is not named. He asked for anonymity, and there is no public interest in identifying a private individual undergoing treatment for a brain tumour. Bajaj Housing Finance Limited ("BHFL") is named, because the conduct described is that of a regulated financial institution and is documented in its own signed correspondence.
Where the borrower's account and BHFL's account differ, both are set out. BHFL's denials are recorded at length below.
The facts not in dispute
In November 2023, BHFL sanctioned and disbursed two housing facilities totalling ₹2.10 crore to a salaried professional in Delhi and his mother, secured by a mortgage over their flat. His mother, then 67, is the registered owner. The instalments were serviced without incident until the middle of 2024. BHFL's own reply records that "payments were regular until mid-2024."
Then, in April 2024, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
The illness
A vestibular schwannoma is a tumour that grows on the eighth cranial nerve — the nerve of hearing and balance — inside the internal auditory canal, at the base of the brain. It is not cancer, and that word does a great deal of misleading work. It is a space-occupying lesion in the skull: it destroys hearing on the affected side, produces relentless tinnitus and vertigo, and, left unchecked, can press on the brain-stem. It is not a condition one recovers from over a weekend.
His had been announcing itself for years before anyone found it — vertigo from 2013, ringing in the right ear from 2018, progressive hearing loss on that side. An MRI on 22 April 2024 identified the lesion. On 23 April 2024, at the Gamma Knife Centre of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, he was admitted, treated and discharged on the same day.
Gamma Knife stereotactic radiosurgery involves no incision. A frame is fixed to the skull and several hundred focused beams of radiation are converged on the tumour in a single session. Patients walk out the same evening, which tends to obscure what has actually happened to them. It is brain surgery in every sense that matters, and it does not end the illness — it begins a lifetime of surveillance, because the lesion remains and must be watched.
That is precisely the course his records show. A contrast-enhanced MRI on 25 September 2024 reported a residual lesion in the right internal auditory canal measuring roughly 16.8 mm, involving the eighth-nerve complex, and was read as consistent with residual or recurrent disease. His AIIMS neurosurgeons characterised the interval appearance as "mild pseudoprogression" — a recognised, usually transient phenomenon after radiosurgery — and continued him on periodic imaging rather than re-intervention. Later review recorded the lesion as stable, with occasional vertigo and intermittent headache controlled on medication. Repeat contrast-MRI surveillance ran through 2025.
Meanwhile, on 16 April 2024 — days before the procedure, and while the diagnosis was fresh — his employer issued a termination notice. His employment ended that July. The family's principal income stopped in the same quarter that its medical expenditure began.
Four months later, in August 2024, his mother — then 67, and the registered owner of the mortgaged flat — suffered a transient ischaemic attack. She was admitted for six days; angiography recorded 50% ostial stenosis in the coronary circulation. She was subsequently diagnosed with neovascular age-related macular degeneration, a progressive condition threatening central vision. Both conditions require continuing and expensive management.
So by the close of 2024 the household consisted of a man in his forties under neurosurgical follow-up for a brain tumour, with no job, and his sixty-seven-year-old mother recovering from a stroke-warning event with cardiac and retinal disease.
The family did not default silently. They disclosed the illness and the job loss, supplied medical records, and asked for a temporary moratorium — expressly not a waiver, not a write-off, and not any reduction of principal or contractual interest. Interest would continue to accrue; only the timing of repayment would change.
What follows is what BHFL's own letters say happened next.
Four things BHFL has put in writing
1. It commenced an arbitration, then withdrew it.
BHFL referred the dispute to a sole arbitrator appointed unilaterally, through an arbitral institute of its own selection, on a disclosed fee of ₹1,000, under a clause treating the borrower's silence for seven days as consent. When the borrower's counsel challenged that appointment, BHFL did not defend it. Its reply of 21 June 2026 states that the arbitral proceedings "were in any event subsequently withdrawn/discontinued," that the demand concerning the arbitrator's mandate "has already been acted upon," and that the reference "no longer survives and is rendered infructuous."
BHFL's later reply of 10 July 2026 confirms the discontinuance as "accurate statements of fact," while denying that it concedes anything about the clause's validity — a claimant, it says, may discontinue a proceeding "for its own commercial or administrative reasons."
The relevant law is not obscure. In TRF Ltd. v. Energo Engineering Projects Ltd., (2017) 8 SCC 377, and Perkins Eastman Architects DPC v. HSCC (India) Ltd., (2020) 20 SCC 760 — reaffirmed by the Constitution Bench in Central Organisation for Railway Electrification, 2024 INSC 857 — the Supreme Court has held that a party interested in the outcome cannot unilaterally constitute the tribunal.
2. It offered to place that arbitration "on hold" — for EMI plus an extra 25%.
This is the passage that most deserves public attention. BHFL's reply records, more than once, that the arbitration "could be placed on hold provided the Borrower paid the regular EMIs before the 20th of each month together with an additional 25% of the pending EMI amount."
BHFL's position is that this was "a lawful, transparent, and commercially reasonable regularisation proposal" and "an opportunity extended to them, not an act of coercion." It says it is "not obliged to finance continuing default."
Readers can judge for themselves what it means for a live legal proceeding against a brain-tumour patient to be expressly available for suspension on payment of a quarter more than his contract required.
3. It extended an "accommodation" — and now says it was never binding.
BHFL's reply of 21 June 2026 states that it "did consider the matter sympathetically by extending accommodation, offering waiver of charges, and withdrawing the arbitration proceedings." Elsewhere it records that a "waiver of charges was under consideration."
Its later reply reframes all of this: "accommodation," "indulgence," "goodwill waiver," and "abeyance" were, it says, used "solely in [their] ordinary institutional and descriptive sense" and were "temporary, conditional, and revocable." "Under consideration" is not "approved"; "conditional" is not "concluded"; "forbearance" is not "novation."
Both propositions may be arguable. What is difficult is holding them simultaneously: BHFL relies on the borrower's failure to comply with the conditions of an arrangement whose existence, as a binding matter, it denies.
4. It said the medical records were never supplied. They had been — with proof.
BHFL's reply of 10 July 2026 states that "no Annexure F, medico-legal schedule, medical record or supporting clinical material has in fact been supplied to, delivered to, or made available for inspection by BHFL," and that until produced it "is unable to verify" the conditions alleged.
The records — the AIIMS Gamma Knife documentation, the post-operative MRI surveillance, the audiograms and the neurology consultations — had been served on BHFL's Grievance Redressal Officer and its National Head (Debt) by confidential email on 8 July 2026 at 19:59 IST, two days before that reply was signed. The sending records exist.
At paragraph 90 of the same letter, BHFL advises the borrower "to furnish complete and relevant medical records, with a written request for restructuring or accommodation, for BHFL's internal assessment" — an invitation to do what had, by then, already been done twice.
The cheque
At disbursal in November 2023, the borrower handed BHFL a blank, undated cheque as security — standard practice across Indian retail lending, and a document most borrowers sign without a second thought.
Fifteen days before it was presented, on 1 July 2026, the borrower saw a neurologist — a D.M. in Neurology from AIIMS — complaining of headaches that had run continuously for a week, with disturbed sleep and persistent tinnitus, on the background of the treated schwannoma. The consultation was recorded as vascular headache. Medication was prescribed. And under the heading of advice, the treating physician wrote, in terms, that the patient was to "avoid tension and anxiety" and to "reduce stress from all activities."
On 16 July 2026, mid-dispute, that cheque was completed with a figure of BHFL's own computation — ₹1,90,80,000 — and presented for clearing. His bank's message that afternoon recorded a resulting balance of minus ₹1.91 crore and gave him one hour to fund the account. The cheque was returned unpaid.
Two features are worth noting. First, the borrower had formally disputed the quantum months earlier and had asked repeatedly for a certified, line-itemised statement of account; none was furnished. The figure written into the instrument had never been reconciled with him. Second, BHFL had accepted in writing that communication would route exclusively through the borrower's counsel — yet the presentation came without any intimation to that firm.
The consequence is that a Section 138 Negotiable Instruments Act exposure — a criminal liability carrying up to two years — now attaches to a patient under continuing neurological care, on an instrument he never wrote a figure on. A man whose neurologist had, a fortnight earlier, put in writing that he must reduce stress from all activities is now facing the prospect of criminal proceedings over a blank cheque he handed across a desk in 2023. Section 138 can indeed follow the dishonour of a security cheque, and the statutory presumption favours the payee. But the offence requires a legally enforceable debt in the amount of the cheque — and that amount is precisely what remains unreconciled.
What is still missing, two years on
In all of this correspondence there is one thing conspicuously absent: a decision.
Not a sanction. Not a reasoned refusal. Over months of engagement, records repeatedly furnished at BHFL's own request, and repeated requests simply to be told which officer or department decides a hardship application, the borrower has never received an answer to the question he actually asked.
Recovery never paused while he waited.
This is the structural problem the case exposes, and it is not unique to BHFL. Collections functions exist to recover. Credit and risk functions exist to decide. An exception-based hardship restructuring is a credit decision — but a borrower in distress only ever meets collections. The request is made, over and over, to people with no authority to grant it and no duty to route it to anyone who has. It is never refused, because it is never considered. There is no reasoned order to appeal, and no silence that can be appealed either.
What BHFL says
BHFL denies the substance of the borrower's complaint. In summary, and in fairness to it:
- It denies every allegation of improper recovery conduct — specifically the alleged unannounced Sunday visit of 28 September 2025, unauthorised photography, threats of daily visits, and remarks attributed to named field agents — describing these as "unsupported by any independent, contemporaneous, or credible evidence" and putting the borrower to strict proof. These allegations are contested and unadjudicated, and are recorded here as allegations only.
- It denies any breach of the Fair Practices Code or of any RBI direction.
- It denies that its statements amount to admissions, that any concluded variation or restructuring arose, and that promissory estoppel applies.
- It says penal and default charges are levied in accordance with the loan agreement and applicable RBI directions, including the circular on penal charges dated 18 August 2023.
- It maintains that "medical hardship, however genuine and documented, does not suspend contractual obligations or impair a lender's right of enforcement upon sustained default."
- It emphasises that facilities exceeding ₹2.10 crore were availed and that the default is admitted.
That last point is not in dispute. The borrower has never denied the debt or claimed the money was not his to repay.
The regulatory backdrop
Housing finance companies are regulated by the National Housing Bank and bound by the Fair Practices Code in the RBI (Housing Finance Companies) Directions, 2025, which require fair and transparent dealing and the communication of decisions with reasons. RBI's recovery-agent directions prohibit intimidation and harassment. Its circular of 18 August 2023 bars the use of penal charges as a revenue device. Its directions of 26 October 2023 (operative from 26 April 2024) provide compensation of ₹100 per day for delayed correction of credit information.
None of this requires new law to fix. It requires three things:
- A route for hardship applications that does not run through collections, with a named decision-maker and a published turnaround.
- A written, reasoned decision on every hardship request. A refusal with reasons can be tested; silence cannot.
- A pause on coercive measures while such a request is pending. A lender that asks for medical records and then continues field recovery without ever deciding has made those documents an instrument of delay rather than of assessment.
If this is happening to you
- Put everything in writing; confirm every phone call by email the same day.
- Ask, in writing, for the name of the officer competent to decide a hardship restructuring — and escalate above collections.
- Demand a certified, line-itemised statement of account before accepting any figure.
- Ask expressly for a reasoned decision, citing the Fair Practices Code. Make the silence the grievance.
- Log every recovery contact — date, time, names, what was said.
- Count the security instruments your lender holds. If a dispute starts, revoke authority to fill or present them in writing and demand their return.
- Never ignore a Section 138 notice; the 15-day payment window is real.
- Escalate outside the lender — the National Housing Bank, the consumer fora, and the Debts Recovery Tribunal under Section 17 if SARFAESI measures begin.
Right of reply. Bajaj Housing Finance Limited's position is set out above, drawn from its written replies dated 21 June 2026 and 10 July 2026. BHFL is invited to respond to this account, and any response received will be published in full alongside it.
Note on sourcing. This account is based on BHFL's own signed correspondence, hospital records, and bank records. Quotations attributed to BHFL are taken from its written replies. Allegations concerning recovery-agent conduct are contested, remain unadjudicated, and are identified as allegations throughout. Nothing here is a finding against any party.
This article is published for public education and is not legal advice.