World Consumer Day tomorrow: Time to promote real consumer movement

By Dr. Bhamy V. Shenoy

We in India celebrate two Consumer Days — National Consumer Day on Dec. 24 to commemorate the date on which the Consumer Protection Act came into force to promote consumer rights and responsibilities in 1986 and World Consumer Rights Day (WCRD) on Mar. 15. 

Consumers International, a global federation of consumer groups, has approved the theme for this WCRD to be ‘Tackling Plastic Pollution.’ It is certainly a worthy and pressing consumer problem for India in general and Mysuru in specific. 

However, the real and basic problem we in Mysuru face is getting any type of service from our own, democratically elected Government. Even after 73 years of Independence we the public are treated in all the Government Offices with rare exception as servants rather than masters — a continuing colonial hangover. 

Consumer activists (including myself) have welcomed the latest Consumer Protection Act 2019 which replaces Consumer Protection Act 1986 (COPRA) with great excitement. It is certainly a progressive law which certainly helps the consumers by providing several reforms like the concept of product liability, filing complaints electronically, alternate resolution mechanism like mediation, action against unfair trade practices and misleading advertisements, flexibility to file from where consumers live or work, no fees for filing for cases involving less than 5 lakhs, and providing consumer protection while purchasing online. 

Unfortunately just like COPRA 1986 failed to bring about the systemic changes, COPRA 2019 may face the same dismal results and give at best band aid. One of the biggest hurdles was the ‘inefficiency’ of Consumer Courts which were turned into Civil Courts by the presiding officers by giving never-ending adjournments and consumer unfriendly environment in the Courts.

It is high time, NGOs start demanding our rights of getting services with minimum delay and inconvenience. For that we need to strengthen consumer movement by taking active part either by joining an existing NGO or starting a new one. Consumer movement should stop concentrating only COPRA, and start working on the concept of public being the masters and not servants. Just like Mahatma Gandhi used a simple concept of protesting salt tax to usher a new chapter in India’s freedom movement, we in the consumer movement should adapt a new strategic direction to demand the status of masters in all the Government Offices and stop acting as servants.