The Centre on Friday said all states must establish price monitoring centres in all districts. It said they must achieve the target of 750 price monitoring centres by March 31, 2023, for which financial support was assured. Speaking during a day-long workshop in Guwahati on December 2, Rohit Kumar Singh, Secretary of the Department Of Consumer Affairs, explained that the Centre, through its price monitoring division, is making every effort to control prices of essential commodities, thereby checking inflation.
The Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) regularly generates data about prices and has a system of collecting prices of 22 essential food commodities in the country.
The secretary, during his inaugural address, informed how the Department, National Commission, State Commissions and District Commissions, and the whole ecosystem — in terms of quality, quantity, standards, testing and benchmarks through BIS, NTH, Legal Metrology and National Consumer Helpline — are working together towards the protection of consumer interests.
He further highlighted the role of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) in developing Indian standards and pointed to the implementation of voluntary and mandatory standards such as quality control orders.
Speaking about the domain of consumer protection, he underlined that the infrastructure of commissions, human resources in consumer commissions and use of technology are three verticals through which the ecosystem of consumer protection is made robust and responsible.
He assured that the department will fully support all state and district commissions when it came to infrastructure for effective functioning of consumer commissions as per the policy which states that 50 percent will be funded by the state government and 50 percent by central government. He also requested all representatives of the state governments to provide their utilisation certificates of the previous year, if pending, without which Centre cannot release the funds for the subsequent year.
Commenting on the appointment of the presidents and members and the matter of vacancies in consumer commissions, he said the position of North East is the best in the country in terms of lesser number of vacancies in consumer commissions.
Highlighting the facility of online filing of consumer complaints through e-daakhil, he said the department has recently finalised a format/template for the consumer to file a complaint which has standard fields — and once all the mandatory information is provided, the commissions can easily admit the genuine cases.
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He assured that the template will be very soon deployed and proliferated in the system and thereby commissions may expect a rise in the number of cases being filed through e daakhil throughout the country.
Singh further said there has been a steep rise in consumer grievances registered in the e-commerce sector at National Consumer Helpline. Out of the 90,000 complaints registered in NCH every month, 45-50 percent of the total complaints pertain to e-commerce.
Talking about the various recent initiatives of the department, he informed about the launch of BIS standard IS 1900/2022 on fake reviews wherein e-commerce companies need to adhere to these standards within their policy of generating and publishing reviews on their platform.
