The World Consumers Rights Day was observed in the country recently and like every other year, there was a repeat of the urge to ensure proper and legitimate rights of the consumers from pricing to quality. As a ritual, the concerned government authorities and the relevant civil society organisations did not make any lapse in organising befitting programmes on the Day.
Truly, consumers' rights protection is an important socio-economic issue. While rights of the consumers are duly protected through legal means and social awareness in the developed world, there is a great lack in our society. Adulteration of food and medicines, cheating in prices on various commodities and deceiving consumers on product quality go on rampantly. There have been enough media blasts on these which have however helped in plugging some holes.
One of the biggest achievements to this effect was the rolling down of a practice that enabled the suffering consumers to lodge complains against food adulteration. If found guilty, the targeted business would be fined or other measures including closure and that the complainant would be compensated. This was a welcome initiative that gave some relief to the consumers.
A consumer is anyone who buys and uses a product or service for his/her living or meeting needs, desires and aspirations. From food to medicine, from travel to entertainment, from education to employment, every one relies on others to offer the products or services. The consumer is always governed by faith, belief and trust to avail the product and services in expected value. However, the problem begins when they are cheated. This is the case of exploitation by the unscrupulous business that cares little about ethics and morality.
Few years ago, food adulteration or cheating on food items in terms of quality and weight used to make daily headlines. Alarms were sounded against diseases and other health hazards. The case was bitter with the free-wheeling use of formalin. Thankfully, hectic social outcries brought the sticks to be hammered on the culprits. Nevertheless, that was a peanut compared to the mammoth abuse of consumers' rights as unsafe food and medicines are still aplenty across the country.
Consumers need protection not only for food and medicine but also for everything. In the recent time, there have been a plethora of complains against mobile phone operations. Consumers feel they are being deceived in billing and quality of service. Now that mobile phone accessibility has reached an unprecedented level in the graph of users, exploitation by the operators should not be allowed at all. Authorities should also clamp down on deceptive advertisements that lure the consumers, mostly the ignorant ones.
A big challenge for our consumer protection measures is the spree of advertisements. There has to be strict monitoring of the advertisements that deceive or mislead the consumers. It is unfortunate that our civil society organisation like the Consumers Association could not play any tangible role as yet. The Competition Commission could be a dependable authority with empowerment to oversee the matter and penalise the defaulters. Few examples of punishment could help in disciplining the unscrupulous business as well as assuring the consumers that their rights are protected. We need to rewind the drive.
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