Awareness as an Instrument to Utilize Consumer Rights

Book excerpt: Kautilya's monumental treatise on state- craft 'Arthashastra' dealt with the subject of consumer awareness and protection of his interests. But the fact of the matter is that the consumers are still victims of unfair and restrictive trade practices adopted by trader or manufacturer. With an enormous population along with high levels of poverty, unemployment and poor literacy levels, consumer awareness level towards their rights continues to remain low. Under the section 6 of Consumer Protection Act, there has been an effort to empower consumers by giving them six basic rights. The study aimed to analyze the consumers' awareness and utilization of consumer rights given under Consumer Protection Act. Further, it checked the consumers' knowledge about documents required at consumer forums to file consumer cases. The nature of data used in the present study is primary which had been collected by using a structured questionnaire. 600 respondents of rural and urban areas of fifteen districts of Haryana were sampled. Responses were analyzed by the help of Percentage, Chi- square, Karl Pearson Co-efficient of Correlation and presented by tables and figures. It was concluded that the level of awareness of consumer rights was high among the respondents. Respondents with high education level and high level of income were more aware as compared to those having poor education level and low income level. It was surprising to note that even the level of awareness of consumer rights was high but the utilization of these rights was not observed at very good level. It was inferred that respondents did not know the procedure to move to consumer forums if they had any grievances as nearly 3/4th respondents did not know the documents required for filing the complaints in the consumer forums.