Consumer disputes and
product liability.

The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 retains a three-tier adjudicatory structure: a District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, a State Commission in each state, and the National Commission. Which forum hears a complaint at first instance depends on the value of the goods or services paid as consideration. The pecuniary limits are set by the jurisdiction rules made under the Act and have been revised, so the current thresholds should be checked before filing. Appeals run from the District Commission to the State Commission and from the State Commission to the National Commission. An appeal to the Supreme Court lies against orders of the National Commission made in the exercise of its original jurisdiction. Two features matter to any business selling nationally. A complaint may be instituted where the complainant resides or personally works for gain, in addition to the places where the opposite party resides or carries on business, and complaints can be filed electronically. Revisional powers are exercised in defined circumstances. The consequence for an online seller is that the forum follows the customer, and the customer can be anywhere the delivery went.

So a national consumer business should expect proceedings in places it has never had an office, and arrange representation on that footing rather than treating each one as an exception.

The definition does real work here. A consumer is a person who buys goods or hires services for consideration, including where payment is deferred, and the definition extends to a beneficiary who uses them with the buyer’s approval. It excludes a person who obtains goods or services for resale or for a commercial purpose, subject to the exception for goods or services used exclusively for earning a livelihood through self-employment, and that exclusion is heavily litigated on its facts. In business-to-business disputes it is often raised at the outset. The definition now expressly covers transactions conducted through electronic means, and the point can be determined before the merits are reached.

The Act also provides for mediation through consumer mediation cells attached to the commissions, and a referral is worth taking where the complaint has substance and a finding would not.

The product liability chapter of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 is the largest change the Act made for anyone sitting in a supply chain. It creates a statutory claim for harm caused by a defective product, and it reaches the product manufacturer, the product service provider and, significantly, the product seller. A manufacturer can be liable where there is a manufacturing defect, a design defect, a deviation from manufacturing specifications, non-conformance with an express warranty, or a failure to give adequate instructions or warnings. A product seller who is not the manufacturer can be liable in defined situations: where it exercised substantial control over designing, testing, manufacturing, packaging or labelling; where it altered the product in a manner substantially contributing to the harm; where it gave an express warranty independent of the manufacturer’s; where it failed to exercise reasonable care in assembling, inspecting or maintaining the product, or to pass on the manufacturer’s warnings; or where the product manufacturer is not identified, is not subject to Indian law, or an order made against it could not be enforced. Statutory exceptions exist, covering misuse, alteration after sale and products supplied as components, along with limits relating to obvious risks and warnings given through a competent intermediary.

For a platform or a retailer this changes the diligence question. Whether a business is a product seller in the statutory sense turns on what it actually does with the product, not on how the contract labels the relationship. Private-label goods, own-brand packaging, assembly, installation services and independent warranties each move a business towards the manufacturer end of that range, and they do so quietly, because none of them is usually decided as a legal question. The contractual response is back-to-back indemnities, evidence of the supplier’s insurance, and retained batch records, all of it in place before anyone needs it. An indemnity from a supplier that has stopped trading is worth nothing, and an insurance certificate nobody checked at renewal is worth slightly less than that. Batch records are frequently the weakest part of the chain. A supplier can be solvent, insured and entirely cooperative, and the exercise still fails if the business cannot say which units came from which consignment and where those units went, because the question asked afterwards is always about a population rather than about the one item that caused the harm.

The Central Consumer Protection Authority can act where consumer rights are affected as a class, on a complaint, on a government reference or on its own motion. It has an investigation wing headed by a Director General. Its powers include ordering recall of goods that are dangerous, hazardous or unsafe, ordering reimbursement of prices paid, directing that unfair trade practices be discontinued, and imposing penalties for false or misleading advertisements. These proceedings can run alongside individual complaints on the same facts.

Labelling failures are readily provable, which is why they are a common subject of complaint.

The Legal Metrology Act, 2009 and the Legal Metrology (Packaged Commodities) Rules, 2011 require pre-packaged commodities to carry declarations on the label. They include, among others, the name and address of the manufacturer, packer or importer, the common name of the commodity, the net quantity, a date declaration that varies with the commodity, the retail sale price expressed as a maximum price inclusive of all taxes, consumer care contact details, and the country of origin for imported goods. For online sale the rules require specified declarations to be displayed on the platform listing, and that list should be read against the current rule. The listing template and the physical label are worth maintaining as one thing rather than by two teams who do not speak. Sectoral rules sit on top, food labelling regulations among them. A declaration missing from a listing is provable from a screenshot, which is why complaints of this kind get filed and decided without much argument about the facts.

Recall is a legal process before it is a logistics problem. The Central Consumer Protection Authority can order recall of unsafe goods, and sector regulators run their own procedures, including the food recall framework. Recall decisions are difficult to make well under time pressure, which is why the approach is usually settled in advance: who authorises a hold, how affected batches are identified from the records that actually exist, how customers are reached where the sale went through a marketplace, how refunds are issued, who speaks publicly, and when regulators and insurers are told. Traceability is what decides whether a recall stays narrow or goes total.

The most valuable work in this practice is not adversarial. A grievance process that resolves complaints properly reduces the number that escalate. That needs intake channels a customer can actually reach, acknowledgement within the periods the applicable rules prescribe, and a first line with real authority to issue a refund or replacement within defined limits without escalating. It needs clear rules on what must be escalated immediately, particularly anything involving injury, a safety issue or a legal notice. And it needs records: order data, delivery evidence, the policy in force on the transaction date, and the full communication history, retrievable by order number rather than reconstructed from three systems. This work includes process design, escalation matrices and training for the people who have to run the process on a Tuesday afternoon.