Redressing consumers' complaints


Marksman | Published: January 16, 2018 20:05:11 | Updated: January 17, 2018 13:03:14


Redressing consumers' complaints

Any talk on protection of consumer rights usually has been an exercise in trying to cope with two  extremes: Mobile court raids to penalise adulteration of foods and medicine  or other deviant practices to short-change customers to turning a blind eye to collusive extortionist tyranny against consumers.  This    conjured up the vision of  sellers or service providers dominating the market. Even the conventional commercial wisdom that customers/clients should be treated as 'masters', not as  favour-seekers was being  replaced by an arrogant salesmanship .

But such attitudes are changing due to competition in the marketplace,   exposure to the glamorous  customer-oriented multi-choice  business world and the enlightened consumers demanding their money's worth.

For all these changing reflexes though, our consumers are yet to assert their rights  to a level that their counterparts  even in the neighbouring countries have been demonstrably  doing. It is a matter of  culture which happily has started percolating the social strata. Thanks to the persistent articulation by the Consumers' Association of Bangladesh, consumer grievances which had languished  on the back burner have started  emerging on the list of concerns, if not as a top priority yet.

Even so, an improved ambience is unfolding for a key element to consumer rights protection to come into play. We  have an institutional framework for the protection of consumer rights under the Consumer Protection Act, 2009.This includes, among other things,  a mechanism to entertain and  redress complaints in the shape of the Directorate of  National Consumer Rights Protection (DNCRP). Basically, it functions as a watchdog body to redress  consumer grievances brought before it or otherwise it has  taken cognizance of via media reports. We are assuming that the DNCRP, given the current level of public awareness  of the channels  of airing their grievances, may  itself  take up some complaints  by way of sensitizing the people about going for it. But in the main,   complaints will have to be lodged with the above-named  government  directorate to seek remedy from the body in which a quasi-judicial authority   has been vested, as it were,  under the consumer rights protection act of 2009 to dispose of complaints.

While 1,105 complaints had been    filed between June 2009 and June 2016, the DNCRP has had  already in  hand 5000 complaints and expects to be receiving 12,000  by the end of fiscal 2017-2018. But the DNCRP's capacity is limited to 212 officers  and staff spread thin across all the districts of the country. Unless its manpower and logistics are beefed up, it cannot cope with the  load of work.

It is important to take into account   the benefits to accrue from  the directorate's work. In the first place, around 3,000 plaintiffs received TK.4.1 million as 25 per cent compensation on their losses until December 2017. And, the directorate deposited Tk 250 million to the government exchequer until  December, 2017.That amount was realized as fine from 35,018 guilty business houses since the organisation's inception in 2009.

Now, the imperative is two-fold: Redefining   provisions of the law in order that its jurisdiction effectively extend over allegations against  all service providers (including mobile operators) and launching a campaign for making the citizens aware of the provisions of the Act and how they can benefit from it.            

safarihi43@gmail.com

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