In India we are lucky we have options, if every company is like this in America then it is a nation of cheats and frauds, he says. "Sarkari Bank aur Sarkari Insurance hee sab sey accha hai," he adds.

"Today, my blood boils when we see advertisements on TV of the same company stating that their agents are angels and always give the right advice," he says.

The company in question followed a very aggressive marketing strategy and enrolled good looking and wannabe young women to market its products. It sold them dreams of foreign trips and foreign postings and dinners and parties in five star hotels. The women were first hooked and then hooked the men for investing in the company.

Almost Rs. 70 to 80 crore worth of premium for two years has been transferred to ICICI Prudential by Bank of India. To save money, these private insurance companies have done away with agents and were having a tie up with Bank of India, now that this tie up has ended, the investors will surely lose this money as they will forget to pay their third premium. All this will go into the profit of ICICI Prudential, says Y K Arora senior labour leader and Chairman of the Bank of India Staff Union for Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

"We still need to be reminded that we have to pay our insurance premiums, for this agents are necessary, and as such we should invest in LIC because they have agents who remind us of our premium dates," says Arora.

The private insurance sector tends to promote its policies as investment. This is false. Policies should be promoted for risk cover only, which is the primary objective of insurance. Investments are better off in recurring deposits, real estate and schemes other than ULIPS which are share market linked, he says.

Unfortunately even real estate has become high priced with the government agencies neglecting their role of peoples' welfare. "Earlier, the LDA and the Housing Board had investment and housing options for the middle class, lots of my friends today own houses in Lucknow because they could pay the amount in installments… now these schemes have been scrapped," says Arora.

Today, even a Bank official cannot buy a house in the city as the price is beyond his means. Expensive real estate is the result of corruption and black money, and in turn it encourages more corruption, he says.

One of the bigger perils of unrestricted capitalism is that we have such fraudulent companies and they are allowed to operate under legal garb, they exploit loopholes in the law, and the loser is the average middle class individual says Ugrasen Prasad Dubey the AGS of the Staff Union of Indian Overseas Bank. Dubey who sits in the Daliganj branch of IOB says, "Dashmesh is not alone as I have come across such complaints daily, but unfortunately people come to me only after they have invested their money in some such company. After that we are not in any position to help or advise them."