Are bank lockers still the safest place for your valuables?

Bank lockers are trusted to store gold and valuables, but recent cases have raised questions about safety. At the same time, getting a bank locker itself has become increasingly difficult, with waiting lists stretching months or even years in many cities.

Gold jewellery meant for weddings, family heirlooms passed down generations, and important documents are quietly placed inside steel vaults with one simple belief, that bank lockers offer the highest level of security.

But a series of recent incidents across the country has begun raising uncomfortable questions about that assumption.

In Delhi’s Kirti Nagar, a woman alleged that jewellery worth around Rs 60 lakh had gone missing from her bank locker. In Lucknow, police registered a case after four lockers at a bank branch were allegedly broken open and gold ornaments worth about Rs 48 lakh were misappropriated.

In Faridabad, a chartered accountant and his family accused a bank branch of mishandling their locker after nearly one kilogram of gold and three kilograms of silver jewellery were found missing.

In another case in Lucknow earlier this year, jewellery worth nearly Rs 1.5 crore was allegedly stolen from a locker at a nationalised bank, with the customer accusing bank staff of theft.

And in Bengaluru, police arrested an assistant manager of a nationalised bank who was accused of stealing around 2.7 kg of gold ornaments from customers' bank lockers over time and pawning them to fund online betting.