Consumer Justice Report: Weak consumer rights could weaken India’s economic growth

The size of India’s vaunted middle-class is projected to go from 500 million individuals currently to over 700 million in 4-5 years. This expansion is expected to translate into growing consumption of goods and services, apart from increased household outlays on education, healthcare and investment products.

Speculating on how much of this will come to pass is a parlour game. What is really critical here is the ceteris paribus premise, that consumption will keep growing, all other things remaining constant.

What merits examination is whether ideal conditions exist for consumption and whether the consumer is being served. Various studies unambiguously show that the system is loaded against the individual consumer, as the December 2025 Indigo flights fiasco so visibly demonstrated.

The team that publishes the annual India Justice Report has now come out with a Consumer Justice Report 2026, which assesses the capacity of quasi-judicial grievance redressal commissions across the country. What emerges from the findings is not a pretty sight. The problem with consumer redressal commissions echoes a structural and deep-seated deficiency that plagues all tribunals and appellate bodies.

A little background might be helpful here.

The Consumer Protection Act of 2019, which replaced its namesake legislation of 1986 vintage, retained the original legislation’s three-tier consumer disputes redressal structure, but rebalanced their territorial and commercial jurisdictions to make these platforms more accessible for consumers.

These commissions were set up across district, state and national levels to adjudicate consumer complaints, specifically to remedy complaints about defects in goods sold or deficient services rendered.

Alongside, the new Act also introduced a Central Consumer Protection Authority as a regulatory organization to guard against violation of consumer rights, misleading advertisements and unfair trade practices. The Authority’s record has been demonstrably patchy so far.

Three glaring shortcomings emerge from the Consumer Justice Report 2026 findings. These lacunae, apart from highlighting a dysfunctional consumer justice system, also put a question mark over the assumptions made for India’s ambitious economic growth projections, namely that growing consumption by a growing middle class will turbo-charge growth impulses.

The first is a glaring lack of capacity at all levels of the consumer justice delivery system, with key personnel missing to enable timely and fair grievance redressal.

No president has been appointed in multiple district and state commissions; across 29 states and six Union territories, the president’s post was vacant in 17 states. This is a major roadblock to dispute resolution because case allocation or scheduling becomes difficult without an administrative head.

Even where a president has been appointed, the typical commission lacks the full complement of sanctioned members, or has staff shortages across different levels—only 60% of the 159 sanctioned members for states have been appointed. Uttar Pradesh reduced the sanctioned strength for its state commission from 10 to 4 members and was still able to appoint only one member.

Second is the unconscionable lack of gender diversity, with low women’s participation at the leadership and even staff level.

This is true for advanced states as well: Maharashtra has only 8.3% women’s representation in its state commissions. Assam fares even worse with only 7% women representation.

The frequently used excuse for low gender diversity, a paucity of qualified women in the country’s legal profession, seems largely unfounded.

Third, and related to the first two gaps, is the high pendency of cases. Lack of personnel in these critical quasi-judicial organizations invariably leads to swelling pendency of cases and delays in adjudication.

Maharashtra’s state commission (encompassing four circuit and two regional benches) and 40 district commissions received about 91,500 complaints during 2020-24, but were able to dispose of only 65% of the cases. In 19 state commissions where 2025 data was available, 35% of cases were pending for more than three years.

The dysfunction in consumer redressal commissions not only mirrors problems plaguing various tribunals, but also reveals a political unwillingness to enable an efficient judicial system. The government’s lackadaisical approach to tribunals has even invited adverse comments from the Supreme Court (SC) on numerous occasions because it has a direct effect of increasing the caseload for high courts and the SC.

It has been speculated that the reason for the political system’s aversion to setting things right might be the SC’s past ruling that tribunals, as quasi-judicial bodies, should have the same independence as judicial bodies; the chief justice even observed on 19 November 2025 that the government had “chosen” to continually disregard the court’s judgements on tribunals.

It is indeed unfortunate that things have come to such a pass because it hinders stable economic growth and weakens individual rights.

The author is a senior journalist and author of ‘Slip, Stitch and Stumble: The Untold Story of India’s Financial Sector Reforms’ @rajrishisinghal