Foundation — SCORES, the three-year limit and the SEBI helpline

If water is leaking from the flat above, you knock on your neighbour's door first. Only when there is no answer, or the answer is useless, do you take it to the society or the municipality.

SCORES works the same way, and the chapter says so twice.

Two doors open SCORES, and only two: an unsatisfactory resolution, or no response at all.

Notice the practical reason the chapter gives, which is not about procedure but about speed. A broker who has made an error can usually fix it in a day. A complaint routed through a regulator takes a purview check, a forwarding, a written reply and an action-taken report — all of it correct, none of it fast.

Three points sit in that short passage.

The clock runs from the CAUSE, not from the day you gave up hoping. An unpaid dividend in 2021 starts running in 2021, however many polite letters followed.

Missing it closes SCORES, not the claim. The right survives; only this route is lost. What remains is the entity itself or a court of law — both slower, and one of them expensive.

So the sequence has to be run promptly. Approach the company or broker, give them a fair chance, and if the answer does not come, file — because every month spent waiting for a reply is a month off a three-year limit that nobody will extend.

It is the same lesson as Chapter 4's three working days for reporting an unauthorised bank transaction: in grievance redressal, delay is never neutral.

Look at the list of matters not considered as complaints in SCORES and two of them describe the same misunderstanding:

• "Not satisfied with trading price of the shares of the companies"
• "Seeking explanation for non-trading of shares or illiquidity of shares"

A share that fell from ₹420 to ₹190 has not wronged anybody. Chapter 3 defined risk as "the probability or likelihood of a loss occurring in relation to your expected returns" and said plainly that "risk and investing go hand in hand." A loss is the risk arriving, not a grievance.

A share that barely trades is the same story told through liquidity risk — Chapter 5's "an investment cannot be bought or sold or converted into cash quickly enough." Nobody is obliged to buy your shares.

The other five exclusions follow the same logic of scope:

SCORES redresses grievances against listed companies and registered intermediaries in the securities market. It is not a complaints box for outcomes you dislike.

The chapter provides two quite different channels, and using the wrong one wastes weeks.

That is why "offering suggestions or seeking guidance/explanation" appears in the list of things SCORES does not accept. It is not a rebuke; it is routing.

And the helpline's range is wider than people expect. It will tell you the status of a company (unlisted, sick, delisted, liquidated), the Registrar and Share Transfer Agent of a listed company, where to find the latest NAV of a mutual fund scheme, how to handle transfer and transmission of shares, what to do if shares are lost, forged or fake, how to apply for duplicate shares, how to apply in an IPO, and — usefully — which regulator to approach when the matter is not SEBI's at all, naming RBI, IRDAI, PFRDA and MCA.

It runs all days, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., in 8 languages, across India.

One firm limit: "The helpline service DOES NOT OFFER ANY LEGAL OPINION OR INVESTMENT ADVICE to the investors." For advice, Chapter 11 is unambiguous — only a SEBI registered Investment Adviser.

An investor with a bank problem and an insurance problem does not file both with SEBI because SEBI is the biggest name he knows. The booklet has built a regulator for each sector, chapter by chapter:

Chapter 12 closes with four flow diagrams on exactly these four — securities market, banking, insurance, pension — and Chapter 13 gives the full table of activities and authorities.

And if you genuinely do not know where a matter belongs, the helpline answers that too. Among the services it lists: "the regulators/authorities whom the investor has to approach for redressal of their grievances that are NOT UNDER SEBI PURVIEW. For example, RBI, IRDAI, PFRDA and MCA."

So there is never a reason to file in the wrong place. One phone call, free, in eight languages, settles it.

A complaint filed on SCORES is not a message dropped into a void. The chapter sets out three stages:

1. Purview check — "the complaint is then EXAMINED BY SEBI TO SEE IF THE SUBJECT FALLS UNDER ITS PURVIEW."
2. Forwarding — if it does, "SEBI FORWARDS IT TO THE CONCERNED ENTITY."
3. Two outputs — with an advice to "SEND A WRITTEN REPLY TO THE INVESTOR" and to "FILE AN ACTION-TAKEN REPORT WITHIN THE STIPULATED TIMELINES."

Note that there are two different outputs going to two different places: a reply to you, and a report to SEBI. The second is what gives the first its force.

Around that sit the mechanics worth remembering:

• A unique registration number is generated on filing, "which can be used for future communication", and an e-mail carrying it goes to the address you gave.
• Supporting documents up to 2 MB in PDF; anything larger "can be sent by post to any SEBI office."
• Status is checked by logging in — and for a physical complaint, by entering "the password sent to you by SEBI in the acknowledgement letter."

Keep the registration number. It is the thread that connects every later conversation to the original complaint — much as Chapter 5's contract note is the thread that proves a trade.