The bane of revision petitions

A recent order of the Supreme Court will hopefully discourage unnecessary and lengthy litigation before courts and shorten the adjudication process under the consumer protection law. 

Even though the Consumer Protection Act mandates that complaints filed before the courts be decided within three months, it takes as many as three to 10 years or even more for a complainant to get justice. One of the reasons for such delay is the large number of revision petitions filed before the national commission.  

As per the provisions of the CPA, almost all complaints have to be filed before courts at the district level (District consumer disputes redressal forum) because district forums have the jurisdiction to hear complaints where the value of the goods or services being complained against or the compensation being sought is up to Rs 20 lakh. If this value exceeds Rs 20 lakh, then the courts at the state level or the state consumer disputes redressal commissions located in the state capitals will hear the complaints. The highest consumer court in the country — the national consumer disputes redressal commission — will only hear complaints worth over Rs 1 crore.  In addition, the state commission can hear appeals against the order of the district forums and the national commission, against the orders of the state commission.   Section 21 (b) of the Act also gives the apex court, the revisional jurisdiction.  

That is, the national commission can call for records and pass appropriate orders in any dispute pending before the state commission, or decided by the state commission if, in its opinion, the state commission has exercised its jurisdiction illegally, or with material irregularity, or exercised a jurisdiction not vested in it by law, or failed to exercise a jurisdiction so vested.  

This revisional jurisdiction, however, is different from the appellate jurisdiction in that the former basically confers on the highest court, a supervisory power to rectify any miscarriage of justice. It is, therefore, to be invoked only in exceptional cases to correct a manifest illegality or injustice.   

However, the large number of revision petitions filed before the national commission is an indicator of the indiscriminate use of this provision, particularly by public sector service providers, to contest the decisions of the district forums and the state commissions, that go against them. As a result, complaints move from the district forum to the state commission and then on to the national commission, taking several years in the process. In many cases, the national commission goes beyond its brief in so far as its revisional powers are concerned.  A recent case decided by the Supreme Court is an example. Here, both the district forum and the state commission had held that the repudiation of the insurance claim of the complainant by the insurance company was unjust and directed the insurer to pay the insured, the amount estimated by the surveyor towards repair of the bus that had met with an accident.

Unwilling to accept it, the insurance company invoked the revisional jurisdiction of the national commission and it promptly set aside the orders of the lower courts.  The Supreme Court, before which the complainant appealed, quashed the order of the national commission and restored that of the lower courts. While doing so, it expressed its unhappiness over the way the commission had dealt with its revisional powers.  

Said the Supreme Court: "Also, it is to be noted that the revisional powers of the national commission are derived from Section 21(b) of the Act, under which the said power can be exercised only if there is some prima facie jurisdictional error appearing in the impugned order, and only then, may the same be set aside. In our considered opinion, there was no jurisdictional error or miscarriage of justice, which could have warranted the national commission to have taken a different view than what was taken by the two forums. 

"The decision of the national commission rests not on the basis of some legal principle that was ignored by the courts below, but on a different (and in our opinion, an erroneous) interpretation of the same set of facts. This is not the manner in which revisional powers should be invoked ( Mrs Rubi(Chandra Dutta vs M/s United India Insurance Co. Ltd, March 18,2001)."  Hopefully, this observation of the highest law court in the country will have the desired effect on all those who file such revisions, and also on the apex court, which considers them.

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