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MANY years ago, Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) dealers would refuse to give a gas connection if the consumer did not buy a stove from them. Declaring this as "manipulation of the sale condition" and a restrictive trade practice, the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission used to initiate action against such dealers. Today, people may be rid of that particular kind of restrictive trade practice, but there are many other ways in which their choices are restricted by manufacturers. I find, for example, toilet soaps or bathing bars and even clothes washing bars in tightly wrapped packets of threes. In other words, you have to pick up the entire lot of three and not just one. Now why should a person be forced into buying three? The manufacturer may offer three at a discount, but what if the customer wants only one cake or bar? In many large shops, you no more find single soap cakes, and this is nothing but a restrictive practice and a violation of the consumer’s right to choose. There is another kind of restrictive trade practice that I have noticed in recent years — this is in respect of mosquito repellents. Now, the government’s failure to control the mosquito menace has spurred an entire industry into manufacturing mosquito repellents. First came the coils, which worked without electricity, but produced considerable smoke. Next came the mats, that required small electric machines to vaporise them. And then came the liquid repellents and a different kind of electric heating machines to vaporise the liquid. In the initial years, you just bought the mosquito repellent liquid and a vaporiser machine. Irrespective of the brand, you could fit any liquid refill into the vaporiser machine and it worked. Obviously the grooves in the vaporiser and those on the liquid refill were of a standardised shape and size and they matched. So you had a choice of brands when you bought the refill — if one was ineffective, you tried another and another. At least you could exercise a choice. But today, things have become more complicated. If you have noticed, in recent times, there are more brands and more varieties of the same brand. And the shape and the design of these vaporisers have changed, and with it, the grooves provided to fit the cartridges or the refills. So much so that today you cannot buy any refill — the refill has to be of the same brand and variety, or else, the cartridge does not fit. So you have to note down the exact name of the vaporiser that you have at home and buy the matching refill. Or else, your vaporiser will be of no use. If you have four or five vaporisers of different brands, then you have to make note of each of these and buy the matching refills. Sometimes you do not get the matching cartridge, and if that happens, you cannot use that particular vaporiser. This, as I said, is a restrictive trade practice. Besides unnecessarily making the purchase of refills complicated, it restricts your choice as you are forced to buy the same brand of liquid as the machine. One must also blame the lack of standardisation for what is happening. In fact this reminds me of the situation in respect of electric sockets and switches before they were brought under mandatory ISI certification. At that time, there were no standard sizes for sockets and plugs, and so one had to constantly grapple with the problem of mismatch between them. The plug fixed to an electric or an electronic home appliance would not fit into the socket. So you had to either change the socket or the plug. Or sometimes, the pins would fit so loosely into the holes in the socket that the plug would come off even with a slight movement of the appliance. Or the mismatch would result in heating of the pins and sparking, sometimes even resulting in a fire. Mandatory ISI certification changed all that. Similarly, now the
Bureau of Indian Standards needs to take the initiative and
standardise the mosquito repellents through mandatory certification so
that consumer choice is not needlessly restricted, and people are
not forced into searching for the right cartridge. In addition to
standardisation of the refills and vaporisers, the BIS should also
look at the safety parametres of the repellents and ensure that they
are safe in all respects.
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