Do not let a company take you for a ride…..Ritu Kant Ojha
With the increasing disposable income, the demand for various services and goods has been continuously going up. The advertisements in television, newspapers and magazines influence the your buying decision. However, you may experience manufacturing defects, imperfections, poor quality or deficiency in the services rendered. If you raise voice against the respective company, the response you will get is often not as expected and many times the complaint would even be ignored. If you may want to avoid the hassle of filing a civil suit against a company, national consumer helpline, Core and consumer court can come as a great relief.
Consumer Protection Act, 1986
It is an Act to provide for better protection of the interests of consumers and for that purpose to make provision for the establishment of consumer councils and other authorities for the settlement of consumers disputes and for matters connected therewith. It aims to provide speedy and simple redressal to consumer disputes through quasi-judicial bodies at district, state and national level.
The District Forum is established by the state government in every district. It has a jurisdiction to entertain the complaints where the value of the goods or services and the compensation, if any, does not exceed Rs 20 lakh. The State Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission (SCDRC) has a jurisdiction to entertain complaints exceeding Rs 20 lakh but less than Rs 1 crore. Appeals against the orders of any District Forum within the State are entertained by the State Commission, subject to above jurisdiction. The National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission (NCDRC) sits in the national capital, Delhi, and has jurisdiction to entertain the complaints exceeding Rs 1 crore and appeals against the orders of any State Commission. You can make a final appeal in Supreme Court against an order of the National Commission.
According to the experts, you must first send a notice to the company and once there is no response or unsatisfactory response, you should go ahead and approach the consumer forum. Filing a case in a consumer forum is an easy job. You can file a complaint on a plain paper with the applicable fee. There is no mandatory requirement to hire a lawyer for a consumer court. The fee payable is as low as Rs 100 for amount involving less than Rs 1 lakh in a District Forum and goes up to Rs 5,000 for the cases involving more than Rs 1 crore in NCDRC.
CORE and NCH
Consumer Online Resource and Empowerment Centre (www.ccccore.co.in) and National Consumer Helpline are some of the initiatives by Ministry of Consumer
Affairs through which you can get your grievance registered. Though there is no power vested in these two agencies, they help resolve complaints by taking it up with the respective companies. Between March 2005 and April 2011, Core received over 96,765 complaints out of which 33,359 were resolved. In the last financial year itself, Core received about 18,071 complaints out of which 8,006 were resolved.
National Consumer Helpline (Toll-Free Number: 1800-11-4000 (MTNL/BSNL); 011-27662955-58 for others) follows a three tier approach.
First Tier: Get redressal from the service provider itself. The details of the company, organisation whom the consumer should approach right from the Branch to the Head Quarters are provided.
Second Tier: Information provided on how to approach Ombudsman/Regulators/Industry Association, relevant government departments
Third Tier: The courts are the last resort, if only everything else fails.
According to Deepika Sur, Manager, NCH, The complaints are attended to by the system essentially works as a two way communication. In the period March-May 2011 we forwarded 3,317 complaints to the respective companies and responses received are 1,750 as per the individual companies’ redressal system.
Nature of complaints
According to the data provided by Core and NCH, banking, insurance and telecom top the list of maximum number of complaints. Vinay Singh, a Mumbai based consumer affairs expert says, Consumer courts have emerged as a big relief for the consumers. A customer should never ignore it and must fight for his rights. It is not uncommon to find credit card companies charging extra, insurance companies rejecting rightful claim, bad food served by IRCTC, defect in an electronic good, telecom companies overcharging, or a developer delaying possession and denying the penalty to be paid.
You must not let a company take you for a ride. You must first try to get it resolved through Core or NCH and if it does not get resolved do not hesitate to file a case with a consumer forum.