Consumer rights awareness in urban and rural areas of Muzaffarnagar and Saharanpur districts: an empirical study

Abstract

Consumer rights awareness (CRA) is most vital to society and a way to eliminate malpractices by the manufacturers, producers, and marketers. The heartening part of present day consumer courts to uphold the grievances, agony and strive for a transparent method of essential commodities, services reaches the consumers and to keep the service providers as well as manufacturers, marketers at bay. Corruptions at all stages let those traders to go scot free and unpunished. Hence the need of the consumer rights awareness and legal remedies through consumer courts to help the society s welfare. The awareness is much needed today as we pay for the products from their hard earned money and they should get its worth. Consumers have been all along mute spectators to those malpractices and fraudulent trade practices so for and it is time to tame this evil which spoils the society. The present day techniques by many firms to mislead the customers by reduction of weight, quality, price differences, worthless services, lack of after sales service by ignoring customer s complaints, requests, and lethargic high handedness of monopoly practices. It is consumer fundamental right to know about the safety, durability, worthiness of any product they buying. There are many instances that consumer insists for bills, records, warrantee cards and many times they ignore and it leads to black money transactions, malpractices and what not. Every product has to be displayed with date of manufacturing, weight measurements, maximum retail price (M.R.P.) and warnings of its misuse. Although there are number of laws introduced and still the traders find it easy to dodge and ultimately consumers are the sufferers. Right from the start consumers have been cheated by wrong information s, higher pricing, after sales service. With regard to service providers, they take advantage of consumer urgency and exploit them.