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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.