buyers beware!
Fight for rights
Pushpa Girimaji

Three decades ago, when I started raising consumer rights issues through my columns, most of the highly vocal activists that I met were women. In fact some of the earliest consumer groups in the country were started and run exclusively by women . They took up cudgels against skyrocketing prices, fought against adulterated foods, sat on dharna, took out morchas and generally were a highly motivated lot.

But somewhere along the way, the momentum seems to have got lost, as far as women are concerned. The number of consumer groups run by women has slowly dwindled over the years, while the number of organisations set up by men has increased phenomenally. This could also have something to do with the changing perception- once upon a time, men somehow associated consumer rights with women's rights and were loathe to join the movement, but that slowly changed as consumer rights got national and international recognition. The birth of the consumer protection law (in 1986), also gave an added impetus to the movement. While that explains the involvement of men in the movement, it does not throw any light on the decreasing participation of women in the fight for consumer justice.

Now a study conducted by the Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA) has shown that even when it comes to seeking redress through the consumer courts constituted under the consumer Protection Act, women are far behind men. While 74.4 per cent of the complaints before the consumer courts are men, women complainants add up to only 25.6 per cent. Even though the study has not looked at the nature of complaints filed by women, a good guess is that a large percentage of them are either life insurance or medical negligence cases.

A resident of Delhi once told me that she came to know about the Consumer Protection (CP) Act only when she was trying to help her son with his homework . The text book spoke the law, but she lacked the confidence to write out a complaint or even go to the consumer court . One way of tackling this is to establish 'consumer information and assistance cells' that would encourage and help women consumers to fight for their rights.

Another barrier for women (and men too) is the legalese that is brandied around in the consumer courts, thanks to the large presence of lawyers and the judicial and also some non-judicial adjudicating members with legal background. Unfortunately, they have also rendered the entire adjudication process, highly technical..

The CP Act prescribes a panel of one judicial and two non-judicial members to redress grievances brought before these forums - the idea being that non-judicial members contribute to the informality of the proceedings and also ensure that they remain simple . And of the two members, one shall be a woman, says the Act. While one is mandatory, there can be more than one woman member - in fact even the judicial member can be a woman, but it is hard to find more than one member in any of these forums. Besides, in a number of district forums, the women who are appointed are incapable of actively participating in the adjudication process or take a strong stand on an issue or even write an order and therefore end up playing a subordinate role in the entire grievance redress process. According to IIPA, 14.2 per cent of the women members were housewives before their appointment.

If consumer justice is to become more meaningful and inclusive, there should be larger participation and involvement of qualified women in the process of justice and a larger number of women seeking justice. And the responsibility of ensuring this rests with state governments that enforce the CP Act.

Having said that, I would like to recall briefly , the fighting spirit of two women-both senior citizens. In the first case, Kusum Pande made sure that the telephone department paid for its callous negligence, leading to the death of her husband. Despite 30 letters written during 1993-96, the service provider had not rectified her telephone and when her husband had a massive heart attack, she had to run to a nearby doctor as the telephone was dead. (Smt Kusum Pande vs Union of India, FA No 135 of 2001). In another case, 64-year old Shipra Sengupta took the railways to task for the humiliation suffered by her. On arrival at Chennai from Kolkata, she was harassed and detained overnight by a railway official on charges of travelling without a valid ticket, because according to him, the age proof-a hospital ID card- that she gave for having bought a concession ticket was "inadequate". Her fight helped many senior citizens because soon after, the railways clarified as to what constituted a valid age proof for senior citizens.

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