Consumer Vis-À-Vis Businesses: Grievances Handling and Consumers’ Orientation

Abstract

Indian Consumer has been the victim of exploitation because consumer education is at low level. Even those few consumers who are aware of their rights as consumers do not complain or protest since the exploiter can always manage to protect himself against official action. The study aims to find out the nature of consumers' complaints handling by the sellers and consumers' action against apathy of sellers in handling consumer complaints. The nature of data used in the present study was 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 and presented by tables and figures. It was concluded that majority of consumers had complaints about purchases and most of them either never or sometimes went for lodging the complaints. It was observed that sellers were found to be reluctant in dealing with the consumers' complaints. Only ¼th of the respondents' complaints was dealt promptly by sellers else were delayed or even not attended. Highly educated respondents in high income group were significantly more aware to protest before the sellers than their counterparts. It was a important inference that even after the 25 years of enactment of Consumer Protection Act in India; consumers shy away from taking up their grievances to consumer forums even if they were not satisfied with the compensation of seller. Most of the consumers decided not to purchase from that seller. The tendency of reacting to manufacture's/seller's response found uniform in almost all the demographic segments except few variables. It is suggested that more stringent action need to be taken on manufacturers/sellers by the Government or respective authorities to increase the confidence of consumers in the system.

Keywords: Consumer Exploitation, Sellers Apathy, Consumer Complaint, Complaint Lodging, Consumer Action