Avoid SBI. Apart from shitty service at its branches, SBI has quite become the Airtel of banking sector (Milking customers due to availability). SBI charges ₹114 per year for its debit card that doesn't work on international sites. Plus ₹15 per quarter for SMS. They were charging fee for using debit card online above a particular number of times last year but I am not sure if they still do.
If you can maintain ₹10k balance, I will suggest that you go for any private bank like HDFC, Axis or Kotak. After ING-Kotak merger, it has become the 3rd largest private bank in India, so ATM and branch availability should not be an issue.
Totally agreed. I have a SBI account linked to a PPF account and I also have a 2 Lac Fixed Deposits linked with the account. I am still charged SMS fees and the like and for what? Because they send the OTP when you make a transaction online. They also charge me every time I do an NEFT which none of my private banks do (salary account or not). Thankfully, I did not get an Debit card for this account, otherwise, I would be charged fees for that too. My mom's and sister's account are charged fees for the card as well.
Furthermore, you would be left utterly helpless if anything goes wrong while doing a transaction whether its online purchase/credit back after cancelling an order or any bank related transaction. They have a call center and toll free number whose sole job is to tell you to go to the home branch for whatever issue.
And let me assure you that visiting their branch is an exercise in testing your patience and endurance. Most of the time, they will have large queues piled up and employees are inefficient as hell. They have electronic cash counters and still the guy behind the counter will count cash twice with the electronic counter and 3 times by hand even while the queue is piled up till its outside the main door. A lot of times, they will complain that there is some problem with the network or the systems and they will be happily playing solitaire while customers wait in lines.
Online facility is nothing great either. You can book an FD online or cancel an FD only during official working hours only.
If you don't make any transaction for a few months, your account will be locked out and you have to visit the home branch and get it unlocked, you have to submit a ID proof and apparently you cannot use a document that you used in the past. For instance, if you opened the account with your passport as proof, you apparently cannot use a passport as proof when the account gets locked out, so you have to submit something else like the Aadhar card. Either you be careful not to let your account get locked out or every time this happens, you better be prepared to pull a fresh id proof out of your ass or your account will not be unlocked.
They also apparently have one of the worst history of bank related frauds and mistakes. They don't scrutinize well where it matters. Several times, fraudsters have picked up cheques dropped by customers in ATMs, got a account created in SBI with a similar name with fake documents and managed to get the cheques deposited and withdrew the amount.
Every time I had to deal with SBI has been a taxing experience. The only reason I even have the account is because of the PPF account and because the bank won't easily let me migrate my PPF account to ICICI without a fight.
) Their site is a breeze to traverse through with no clutters or confusions.