Does anyone know how many vehicles were actually affected during the December 2015 floods in Chennai? I asked around, surfed furiously and checked some official documents. No concrete estimate is available. Most data vary agency to agency, expert to expert, company to company.

In December itself, newspaper reports said carmakers in Chennai were ‘gearing up’ to repair at least 12,000 cars affected by the devastating rains. An expert tracking the automobile industry told me that the number could be anything between 15,000 and 18,000. If you take the median figure of 15,000 and if you think an ambitious number of 100 cars get repaired every day, it would take at least five months to clear the load.

Has anyone thought about it? I did, just last week, only when the agency I had given my fully-damaged car to was not giving an exact date of return for my humble Alto K10, bought only in January 2015.

In December I had told my dealer about the car, how flood-ravaged it was. The dealer, a popular name in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, took at least a month to tow the car away to its repair house in Saligramam. Of course, I paid the towing charges.

Then came insurance talk. Fortunately, the dealer said they would deal with all that and all I had to do was sign and sit back. I did so; this was at least two months ago, and after repeated enquiries I came to know recently that they have just purchased the damaged parts and work on my car would start soon. Which means, in all likelihood, I am not going to get it back for another month or so.

The dealer says it is business as usual. But to me, and to several other customers as I have found out, that’s a pain, given that we are left with no option but to wait it out. As the car is under repair, there is no question of buying a new one, and as the repair goes on and on like an unending soap opera fuelling uncertainty, the inconvenience is just getting harder and harder. The amount of man-hours lost due to this difficulty is not measurable but significant.

Of course, the dealers claim they are delivering repaired cars, but there are no estimates available.

The fact is, they are not accountable to anyone. Thousands of consumers are waiting for their damaged vehicles to come back fixed. Those who had opted to chuck insurance and spend from their own pocket to repair their vehicles at local workshops or sell off damaged cars immediately after the floods seem to have made the wiser choice. Some had to sell their cars to their dealers dirt-cheap and that amount served as the down payment for the new car.

As cumbersome as getting a car repaired is, buying a new car is a win-win deal – for the dealer and the insurer.

Why do car companies and dealers feel they can go the business-as-usual route? An employee at a car dealership in South Chennai says very few companies have brought in extra manpower from sister concerns or other States to expedite the repair mission. If what they have been claiming in their press releases were true, almost all cars would have come back to their owners by now, says he. There is some truth in it.

There is no agency to track post-flood repair work, or facilitate grievances. Granted, one can complain to consumer forums or companies. Someone should have thought about this. The authorities should have set up a regulator exclusively for this purpose, which would have kept updated data on post-flood works.

Of course, this applies to all sectors – real estate, roads, to name a few.

If a database of such works and grievances is made public, it would help the people and policymakers and regulators themselves know what’s really at stake and what the cost to it is.

And such accountability would have helped the consumers take dealers to task. Such transparency is alarmingly missing in our post-disaster operations. Where guesstimates replace real data, consumers are taken for a ride by irresponsible companies. When will we ever learn? Or will we ever learn?

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