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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Indian consumers fight weak laws, slow courts by Rama Lakshmi

In a packed special court that hears consumer complaints, Hansraj Sharma nervously shuffled through a pile of papers that told the story of his decade-long battle against a car dealer and a bank.

District and state-level consumer courts twice sided with Sharma, awarding him $800 for a shady loan scheme. But the defendants repeatedly appealed. Now, after 58 court appearances, his case still drags on.

"They keep asking for adjournment on some ground or the other. Sometimes they don't even turn up in court," said Sharma, a 47-year-old teacher. "They just want to delay the process and make me give up in frustration."

India has the world's largest number of middle-class consumers: 300 million and many more moving up the economic ladder every year. But analysts say the country's 1986 consumer law and special consumer courts are unable to handle the burst of spending of the past decade.

The courts were envisaged to offer a simple, quick process but instead have become just as slow-moving as the regular courts, replete with lawyers endlessly quoting case laws, appealing and asking for recesses.

"I am fighting for my rights for 10 years in a country that is urging us to buy, buy, buy all the time," Sharma said. "The court experience has doubled my harassment. So many years of my life just wasted in this fight."

The government has begun to develop alternatives to the slow route of courts and encourage companies to resolve complaints quickly.

"The time taken for disposal of grievances is going up, and we seem to be moving away from the goal of speedy redressal of consumer grievances," Rajiv Aggarwal, secretary of the department of consumer affairs, said at a conference last month.

He said the government is considering changing the law to limit appeals and establish penalties for court delays, among other measures.

The department is also running a nationwide campaign called "Awake, Consumer, Awake."

"Awareness of consumer rights in India is low, assertion is even lower and protection is substandard," said Sri Ram Khanna, a commerce professor at the University of Delhi who runs the state-supported National Consumer Helpline. "The Indian consumer rights movement is where America's was 50 years ago."

The helpline now receives more than 300 calls a day from angry consumers.

"In India, companies can continue making profits even when it has angry consumers, because the market is so huge and untapped," Khanna said.

As the market grows more competitive, companies have slowly begun to respond to consumer complaints. Some have set up complaint response systems, and many now display a consumer care phone number on their products - a concept that did not exist in the Indian marketplace until a few years ago, activists say.

"This requires a big cultural change in the way the companies work here. It is not going to be easy," said Amit Mitra, the federation's secretary general. "All this happened in the United States over half a century. But we cannot wait. We have to fast-track these processes in the next few years."

Meanwhile, the government is devising ways to prevent consumers from becoming entangled in the court system.

A year ago, eight centers in New Delhi began mediation services. An advertisement for the centers reads: "And you thought disputes have only 2 destinations . . . courts and police stations? Try mediation, get a solution."

On a recent day, a wide range of complainants filled one of the centers - a woman who said a dry cleaner had ruined her $1,500 pashmina shawl, a student who did not want to pay a cellphone company for the extra applications that she said were forced on her and a couple suing a travel agency for a sub-standard holiday package.

"Sometimes, just a written apology resolves the dispute and brings down the consumer's anger," said Sunita Rani, who runs one of the centers. "This cannot happen in courts."

New mediation centers are also planned for city hospitals and train stations, where disputes abound over ticket refunds, train delays and damaged goods.

"Our consumer courts take so long and order such low and miserly compensation that it does not make a hole in the company's pocket," said Pushpa Girimaji, a newspaper columnist who has written on consumer rights for 25 years. "I hate advising people to go to court."