The country’s largest and most trusted public-sector bank, State Bank of India (SBI) has said that it will ‘redesign’ its envelopes used to dispatch tax refund cheques to customers covering their permanent account number (PAN) and contact numbers.

The move comes into effect soon after an activist raised concern that this confidential personal information was visible to anyone on the envelopes resulting in its misuse.

According to a PTI report, 16 months back, activist Commodore (retd) Lokesh Batra had raised the issue that the window envelopes used by SBI makes it easy for someone to glance through PAN and contact number of the tax payee and misuse it.

After repeated in vain attempts, the activist wrote to the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) governor Urjit Patel alleging that SBI was violating its directions on ‘protection of customer’s information’ by publishing crucial information of the customers through its faulty envelopes.

“This systemic failures by banks must be breaching the personal information of very large numbers of people. I had reported this matter at the highest level in SBI... but as of now no one has even blinked...and breaching of people's personal information is continuing,” he wrote to the RBI Governor on November 28.

The retired air force official said he had been “pleading” with SBI at the highest level for the past 16 months to ensure compliance with RBI directions, but nothing has changed.

After RBI referred the matter to SBI, the bank responded by saying that “the envelopes (window envelopes) in which income tax refund orders are being dispatched to various assesses will be redesigned, so that PAN number is not visible to anyone”.