Pradeep S. Mehta | Protecting India’s Consumers 40 yrs: Can I Trust What I’m Going to Buy?

That last sentence says it all. Millions of Indians go through exactly this every day while buying food, medicines, toys, gadgets, etc, not with confidence, but with quiet hope. The hope that someone, somewhere, has checked.

Sunday, March 15, is World Consumer Rights Day, celebrated all over the world, including India, since 1991. This year’s global theme “Safe Products, Confident Consumers” asks whether that hope is well placed. The honest answer: sometimes yes, often maybe, but not yet reliably enough.

*What the numbers tell us: India has worked hard to build consumer protection into law. The Consumer Protection Act 2019 is one of the stronger such laws in Asia. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India monitors what goes into our food. The Bureau of Indian Standards certifies helmets, pressure cookers, baby products, electrical fittings, and so on. The Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) was set up specifically to pursue violations. We also celebrate the National Consumer Day on December 24 every year, in addition to the World Consumer Rights Day. We are very serious about protecting and promoting the consumer cause, as all these are real institutions doing real work.

Like many things, including the dream of becoming a developed nation by 2047, the available data tells us there’s still a long way to go. In the last five years, food safety regulators tested close to 8.7 lakh food samples across India. Nearly one in five failed.

These weren’t exotic items, they included milk products and packaged snacks, things families buy every other day.

The government’s own State Food Safety Index shows over half of India’s states/UTs don’t meet the minimum benchmarks for testing and surveillance. Some states do very well. Others are far behind. A product sold in one state may be vetted carefully; the same product sold 200 km away may never have been inspected at all. This isn’t a story about bad intentions. It’s a story about scale, 1.4 billion people, millions of sellers, and a regulatory system still catching up.

*Problems of a growing marketplace: Physical products are only half the picture. A rising share of Indian consumption happens online, and digital shopping has its own concerns. Most of us have experienced this.

You see a price, add something to your cart, and by checkout the number has changed. A convenience fee appeared. A donation was pre-ticked. A subscription was added. You didn’t choose any of it.

These are what regulators call “dark patterns” and the CCPA has formally identified 13 of them as unfair trade practices under its 2023 guidelines. A large-scale survey last year found these practices across many of the apps urban Indians use daily. The authority has since asked platforms to conduct self-audits to identify and remove them, though implementation remains uneven. The concern is not about e-commerce itself, which has genuinely improved lives. It’s about ensuring the consumer on a phone screen gets the same protection as one in a physical shop.

*Where confidence comes from: Think about how you board a flight. You don’t inspect the aircraft yourself. You don’t read maintenance records. You sit down and read your book, trusting that the aviation authorities have done their job. That is confidence, built not from reassurance, but from institutional credibility developed over time.

That’s what Indian consumers need from product safety systems too. Not reassurance. Not periodic crackdowns that make headlines and then fade. Just the quiet, reliable knowledge that things on the shelves and screens have been checked, and that when something goes wrong, someone will be held to account swiftly.

We are moving in that direction. Quality control orders cover over 800 product categories. Though many of these orders were merely for protectionism and many have been now scrapped. Recall notices for unsafe products have become more visible. The CCPA has pursued cases against misleading ads, faulty products, and digital manipulation. The direction is right.

*What would make the difference: Three things would help, none requiring new laws, just better use of what exists. First, a product recall system that people can actually find and use. When an unsafe product is withdrawn from market, that information should be easy to locate online and not buried in a gazette notification. Second, consistent, all-year enforcement. Not just another routine raid before a festival, followed by silence. Regulators should be seen working all through quietly, routinely, and reliably. Only they build more trust than those who surface only in a crisis.

Third, helping consumers know what they are buying through simpler labelling and QR code to verify certification on the spot.

*A question worth asking: Any mother shouldn’t have to just hope. She should feel reasonably certain that what she feeds her family meets the standards her country has set for itself. That isn’t a luxury. That’s what every consumer deserves.

India has the laws. It has the institutions. World Consumer Rights Day is a good occasion to ask: are we using them to their full potential? The answer, honestly, is not yet, but the foundations are there, and the direction is forward.

Confident consumers don’t just benefit themselves. They build stronger markets, reward honest businesses, and push out the bad actors who thrive on information gaps. Getting consumer safety right isn’t a social obligation that competes with economic growth. It is just the kind that is shared, trusted, and built to last.

Pradeep S. Mehta is the secretary-general of CUTS International, a 42-year-old leading global public policy research and advocacy group. He is one of the architects of India’s Consumer Protection Act 1986.