The Consumer Protection Act 2019 did something the Indian consumer movement had sought for a generation and had repeatedly failed to obtain. It ended the arrangement under which the only way to set consumer law in motion was for an aggrieved individual to draft a complaint, pay a fee, and pursue a trader through a forum. In place of that arrangement it built a statute with two engines. The first is the familiar one: a three-tier line of commissions before which a complainant may still file, argue and obtain compensation. The second is entirely new: a regulator, the Central Consumer Protection Authority, which may inquire into a violation of consumer rights on its own motion, order goods recalled from the market, direct that prices be reimbursed, and penalise a misleading advertisement, all without any individual consumer having complained at all.

That structural change is the subject of this article. The Act, which is Act 35 of 2019, received the assent of the President on 9 August 2019 and repealed the Consumer Protection Act of 1986. Its territory here is the replacement itself and the substance the new statute added: the Central Authority, product liability, mediation, the treatment of electronic commerce, the definition of an unfair contract, and the offences that stand behind them. The predecessor statute has its own account in this series, and the systematic comparison between the two Acts and the mechanics of filing a complaint belong to companion articles; the wider field, from sectoral ombudsmen to the Bureau of Indian Standards, is mapped in the complete guide to consumer law in India, which this article does not attempt to reproduce. What follows is an account of what the 2019 statute kept from the law it repealed, what it discarded, and what it built that had never existed in Indian consumer law before.

Why the 1986 settlement was replaced rather than repaired

The statute that the 2019 Act repealed had been, by the standards of Indian social legislation, a success worth explaining before it is criticised. The Consumer Protection Act, 1986, which was Act 68 of 1986, created a parallel system of consumer forums at the district, state and national levels, deliberately freed from the procedural weight of the ordinary civil courts. It defined the consumer, the complaint, defect in goods and deficiency in service, and it armed the forums with power to order the removal of a defect, the replacement or refund of goods, and compensation for loss or injury, including the mental agony that the Supreme Court recognised as compensable in Lucknow Development Authority v. M.K. Gupta in 1994, the decision that confirmed housing construction was a service within the Act. For a buyer confronting a builder, a bank or an insurer, the forums offered a forum that was cheap, geographically close and comparatively quick, and they were used in very large numbers.

The case for replacement, as it accumulated over three decades, rested on four failures that amendment had repeatedly proved unable to cure. The first was coverage. The 1986 Act had been drafted for a marketplace of shops, workshops and government services. It said nothing specific about transactions concluded through electronic means, nothing about teleshopping or direct selling or multi-level marketing, and its definition of an unfair trade practice had been framed before the practices of the digital marketplace existed. A consumer who bought from a platform that held neither stock nor a shop had a remedy against the seller in theory and, in practice, frequently no identifiable defendant within reach.

The second failure was the absence of any regulator. The 1986 scheme contained councils charged with promoting and protecting consumer rights, but the councils were advisory bodies. No institution in the Act could act against a practice as distinct from a transaction. A misleading advertisement that injured consumers as a class, each by a small amount that no individual would litigate, generated no case at all: the forums could only respond to a complaint, and a complaint requires a complainant with enough at stake to file one. The harm was real in aggregate and invisible to the machinery. The third failure was doctrinal. Indian law had no statutory product liability regime. A person injured by a defective product sued in tort, where negligence had to be proved against defendants with far greater resources, or squeezed the facts into defect and deficiency under the consumer statute, which was designed for a different complaint. The fourth failure was contractual. Standard form contracts imposed on consumers by lenders, builders and service providers could be one-sided in ways the forums could criticise but had no express power to annul; there was no statutory concept of an unfair contract in Indian law, although the Law Commission of India had recommended legislation on unfair contract terms years earlier.

Why did Parliament replace the 1986 Act instead of amending it once more?

Parliament chose replacement because the defects were architectural rather than verbal: the 1986 Act had no regulator, no product liability chapter, no mediation mechanism and no answer to electronic commerce, and each of those had to be built as a new part of the statute rather than inserted as a patch into sections designed without them.

The drafting history shows how long the architectural answer took to arrive. A Bill to amend the 1986 Act, which would have enabled online filing and addressed unfair contract terms, was introduced in 2011 and lapsed with the dissolution of the Fifteenth Lok Sabha. The Consumer Protection Bill, 2015 was then introduced in the Lok Sabha in August 2015 as a replacement statute, carrying product liability, unfair contracts and a regulatory authority. It was examined by the Standing Committee on Food, Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution, which submitted its report in April 2016 with recommendations on the design of the regulator, on product liability, on penalties for misleading advertisements and their endorsers, and on the pecuniary jurisdiction of the district tier. The 2015 Bill was withdrawn, and the Consumer Protection Bill, 2018 was introduced on 5 January 2018 in its place. That Bill was passed by the Lok Sabha in December 2018 but was not taken through the Rajya Sabha, and it lapsed when the Sixteenth Lok Sabha was dissolved. The Consumer Protection Bill, 2019 was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 8 July 2019 by Ram Vilas Paswan, the Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution. The Lok Sabha passed it on 30 July 2019, the Rajya Sabha passed it on 6 August 2019, and the President assented on 9 August 2019, the date on which the Act was published in the Gazette of India.

The repeal and the two commencement dates

Section 107 of the 2019 Act performs the repeal in the standard three-part form, and its terms matter because they govern every complaint that was alive when the statute changed. Sub-section (1) provides that the Consumer Protection Act, 1986 is repealed. Sub-section (2) provides that, notwithstanding the repeal, anything done or any action taken or purported to have been done or taken under the repealed Act shall, in so far as it is not inconsistent with the provisions of the new Act, be deemed to have been done or taken under the corresponding provisions of the new Act. Sub-section (3) provides that the mention of particular matters in sub-section (2) shall not prejudice or affect the general application of Section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897 with regard to the effect of a repeal. Section 6 of the General Clauses Act is the provision that preserves rights accrued and proceedings begun under a repealed enactment, so the combined effect is that the repeal extinguished the old statute as a source of new actions while carrying the old statute’s pending business, its completed orders and its accrued liabilities across into the new regime.

The Act did not commence on a single day, and the division between its two commencement dates is itself informative, because the later date was reserved for the parts of the statute that created the regulator and the offences. By notification S.O. 2351(E), dated 15 July 2020, the Central Government appointed 20 July 2020 for the bulk of the Act: the definitions in Section 2, with five clauses held back; Chapter II on the consumer protection councils; Chapter IV on the consumer disputes redressal commissions, with one sub-clause held back; Chapter V on mediation; Chapter VI on product liability; Sections 90 and 91, the offences concerning products containing an adulterant and spurious goods; the repeal provision itself; and a group of miscellaneous provisions. By notification S.O. 2421(E), dated 23 July 2020, the Central Government appointed 24 July 2020 for the remainder: the five deferred definition clauses, among them the definition of the Central Authority in Section 2(4); the whole of Chapter III, Sections 10 to 27, which establishes the Central Consumer Protection Authority; the deferred sub-clause of Section 58; Sections 88, 89, 92 and 93, covering the penalty for disobeying the Authority, the offence of false or misleading advertisement, cognizance and compounding; and the remaining miscellaneous provisions. The repeal of the 1986 Act therefore took legal effect on 20 July 2020, four days before the authority that symbolises the new Act existed in law.

The transition created the difficulties that repeal and replacement always creates, and the savings clause had to do real work. Complaints instituted under the 1986 Act were pending before forums whose names, composition rules and pecuniary limits the new statute had changed. The deeming language of Section 107(2) meant those proceedings continued under the corresponding provisions of the new Act rather than abating, and the forums, reconstituted and renamed as commissions, took up the files where the old forums had left them. Questions of detail, such as which appellate deposit requirement governs an appeal arising from a complaint instituted before commencement, had to be worked out by the commissions and the courts on the text of the savings clause and Section 6 of the General Clauses Act, because a general savings provision allocates continuity in principle and leaves the hard cases to be decided one at a time. A reader with a live or time-barred claim should treat this account as general information about how the transition was structured and take advice on the facts of the individual matter, because the limitation periods in consumer law are short and unforgiving. One practical consequence of the deeming clause deserves emphasis: an order passed by a forum under the 1986 Act before commencement did not lapse with the forum that passed it. It remained executable as an order of the corresponding commission under the new Act, enforceable through the execution and penalty machinery the new Act provides, which is what a savings clause is for when it is doing its work properly: the litigant who had won under the old law was not to be sent back to the beginning because Parliament had rebuilt the courthouse.

What survived the repeal is as significant as what it removed. The three-tier structure of adjudication survived, renamed: the District Forum became the District Commission, and the State Commission and the National Commission kept their names and their places in the appellate line. The core definitions survived with their accumulated interpretation: consumer, complaint, defect, deficiency, unfair trade practice and restrictive trade practice all carried across, so that the body of precedent built under the 1986 Act, from M.K. Gupta onwards, continued to inform the meaning of the corresponding provisions rather than being discarded with the repealed text. The consumer protection councils survived in Chapter II, at the Centre, in the states and in the districts, charged with the promotion and protection of the rights the Act enumerates. The two-year limitation period for complaints survived in Section 69, with the established power to condone delay for sufficient cause. The appellate structure survived, with appeals from the District Commission to the State Commission, from the State Commission to the National Commission, and from the National Commission to the Supreme Court. The full account of the predecessor statute, its forums and its three decades of interpretation is given in the article on the Consumer Protection Act 1986, and this article confines itself to the mapping the replacement made.

What the replacement changed inside the adjudicatory scheme

The 2019 Act did not leave the adjudicatory engine it inherited untouched, and four changes inside Chapter IV repay attention because each alters who can realistically use the commissions and how.

The first is the measure of pecuniary jurisdiction. Under the 1986 Act, the tier of a complaint was fixed by the value of the goods or services together with the compensation claimed, which meant that the forum could be chosen, within limits, by inflating the compensation figure in the prayer. The 2019 Act changed the measure to the value of the goods or services paid as consideration, a figure fixed by the transaction rather than by the drafting of the complaint. As enacted, Section 34(1) gave the District Commission jurisdiction where the consideration paid does not exceed one crore rupees; Section 47 gave the State Commission jurisdiction where the consideration exceeds one crore rupees but does not exceed ten crore rupees; and Section 58 gave the National Commission jurisdiction where the consideration exceeds ten crore rupees. Each provision, however, was written subject to a power in the Central Government to prescribe a different value, and that power was exercised in the Consumer Protection (Jurisdiction of the District Commission, the State Commission and the National Commission) Rules, 2021, notified on 30 December 2021, which reset the tiers to fifty lakh rupees for the District Commission, above fifty lakh rupees and up to two crore rupees for the State Commission, and above two crore rupees for the National Commission. The reset was a candid admission that the enacted limits had pushed heavy litigation downward faster than the district tier could absorb it. The consideration-based test itself was challenged and upheld in Rutu Mihir Panchal v. Union of India, in which the Gujarat High Court sustained Parliament’s choice to measure jurisdiction by what the consumer paid rather than by what the consumer claims, so the operative bands rest on the 2021 Rules laid over a test the courts have accepted. The threshold question has a second life in housing disputes, where a homebuyer must elect between the consumer commissions and the real estate regulator, and that election, with the threshold applied to it, is analysed in the comparison of the RERA and consumer forums for homebuyers.

The second change is territorial. Section 34(2) retains the traditional bases on which a complaint may be instituted in a District Commission: where the opposite party resides or carries on business or has a branch office or personally works for gain, and where the cause of action wholly or in part arises. It then adds, in clause (d), the place where the complainant resides or personally works for gain. For a buyer dealing with a distant seller through a screen, this is the provision that converts a formal remedy into a usable one, because the consumer no longer has to pursue the trader to the trader’s own district. A corresponding complainant-side basis applies to complaints before the State Commission under Section 47(4). The third change is procedural access: Section 35 permits a complaint to be filed electronically in the manner prescribed, and the procedure framed under the Act accommodates hearings by video conference, so that the filing and the hearing are no longer tied to physical attendance at the commission’s seat. The step-by-step mechanics of institution, admission, notice and hearing are the territory of the guide to filing a consumer complaint, and are deliberately not repeated here. The fourth change is a set of express review powers: Section 40 empowers the District Commission, Section 50 the State Commission and Section 60 the National Commission to review an order where there is an error apparent on the face of the record, a corrective jurisdiction the 1986 Act had not conferred in terms and whose absence had generated avoidable appeals.

Alongside these changes, the definition of a consumer was widened to meet the marketplace the old Act had missed. Section 2(7) provides that buying goods and hiring or availing services includes offline or online transactions through electronic means or by teleshopping or direct selling or multi-level marketing, while continuing to exclude a person who obtains goods for resale or for a commercial purpose, with the established exception for goods bought and used exclusively for earning a livelihood by self-employment. The definition of goods was recast to mean every kind of movable property and to include food as defined in the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006. And Section 2(9) gave the statute an enumerated statement of the rights the whole scheme exists to protect, defining consumer rights to include the right to be protected against the marketing of goods, products or services which are hazardous to life and property; the right to be informed about the quality, quantity, potency, purity, standard and price of goods, products or services, so as to protect the consumer against unfair trade practices; the right to be assured, wherever possible, access to a variety of goods, products or services at competitive prices; the right to be heard and to be assured that consumer interests will receive due consideration at appropriate fora; the right to seek redressal against unfair trade practice or restrictive trade practices or unscrupulous exploitation of consumers; and the right to consumer awareness. The enumeration is not decorative. The Central Authority’s mandate, the commissions’ remedial powers and the offences are all keyed to these rights, which is what allows the regulator to act against a practice by reference to the class right it violates rather than by reference to an individual loss.

The first addition: a regulator, the Central Consumer Protection Authority

Chapter III of the Act, Sections 10 to 27, establishes the Central Consumer Protection Authority. Section 10 empowers the Central Government, by notification, to establish the Authority with effect from the date specified, to regulate matters relating to violation of the rights of consumers, unfair trade practices and false or misleading advertisements which are prejudicial to the interests of the public and consumers. The Authority was established with effect from 24 July 2020, the second commencement date, with its head office at New Delhi. It consists of a Chief Commissioner and such number of other Commissioners as may be prescribed, appointed by the Central Government; at its inception the charge of Chief Commissioner was given to Nidhi Khare, an Additional Secretary in the Department of Consumer Affairs. Section 10 also contemplates regional offices, and Section 17 provides for the appointment of a Commissioner for each regional office and for the officers and employees the Authority requires.

Section 15 creates the Authority’s investigative arm: an Investigation Wing headed by a Director-General, appointed by the Central Government along with Additional Directors-General, Directors and other officers drawn from persons with experience in investigation. Section 16 enlists the district administration by empowering the District Collector, on a complaint or on a reference from the Authority or a regional Commissioner, to inquire into or investigate complaints regarding violation of consumer rights, unfair trade practices and false or misleading advertisements within the district, and to report to the Authority. The design therefore joins a central regulator to two instruments it did not previously have in consumer law: a dedicated investigation wing of its own, and the Collector’s local machinery on reference.

The Authority’s functions are stated in Section 18, and they are drafted by reference to consumers as a class, which is the whole point of the institution. The Authority is to protect, promote and enforce the rights of consumers as a class and to prevent their violation; to prevent unfair trade practices and ensure that no person engages in them; to ensure that no false or misleading advertisement of any goods or services is made in contravention of the Act; and to ensure that no person takes part in the publication of such an advertisement. It may intervene in proceedings before the commissions where it considers it necessary, review the working of the law, undertake and promote research, spread awareness, encourage consumer organisations, and advise the governments of the day on consumer policy. Section 18(2) gives the Authority power to issue guidelines to prevent unfair trade practices and to protect the interests of consumers, and this guidelines power has produced the Authority’s most visible subordinate legislation: the Guidelines for Prevention of Misleading Advertisements and Endorsements for Misleading Advertisements, 2022, notified on 9 June 2022, and the Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023, notified on 30 November 2023, which name thirteen specified dark patterns, from false urgency to basket sneaking and drip pricing, and treat the use of such interface designs as an unfair trade practice.

The procedural heart of the chapter is Section 19. The Authority may, after receiving any information or complaint, or on directions from the Central Government, or of its own motion, conduct or cause to be conducted a preliminary inquiry into whether there exists a prima facie case of violation of consumer rights, or of an unfair trade practice, or of a false or misleading advertisement, prejudicial to the public interest or to the interests of consumers. If satisfied that a prima facie case exists, it causes an investigation to be made by the Director-General or by the District Collector. Where the matter belongs to a regulator established under another law, the Authority may instead refer it to that regulator with its report. For the purposes of an investigation, the Authority, the Director-General and the District Collector may call upon the person concerned and direct the production of documents and records.

What powers of search and seizure support an investigation by the Director General?

Section 22 gives the investigation powers of search and seizure. Where the Director-General or an authorised officer has reason to believe that a person has violated consumer rights, engaged in an unfair trade practice, or made a false or misleading advertisement, he may enter and search a building, conveyance or place, and seize documents, records or articles that furnish evidence.

Where an investigation establishes a violation, Section 20 confers the remedial orders that make the Authority a regulator rather than a reporting body. If satisfied that goods or services are dangerous, hazardous or unsafe, the Authority may order the recall of the goods or the withdrawal of the services; it may order reimbursement of the prices of the goods or services so recalled; and it may order the discontinuation of practices which are unfair and prejudicial to the interests of consumers. Section 21, examined in the next section, adds the advertisement-specific directions and penalties. Section 23 completes the circuit by empowering the Authority itself to file a complaint before a District, State or National Commission in a matter that requires adjudication, so that the regulator can also appear as a complainant before the adjudicatory arm. A person aggrieved by an order of the Authority under Section 20 or Section 21 may appeal to the National Commission within thirty days under Section 24, which is the statutory acknowledgement that the Authority’s orders are coercive and must be answerable somewhere.

Can the Central Consumer Protection Authority award compensation to an individual consumer?

The Authority cannot award compensation to an individual. Its orders are regulatory: recall, withdrawal, reimbursement of the price of goods recalled, discontinuation of a practice, and penalties. Compensation for an individual’s loss remains the business of the commissions, which is why the Authority is empowered to file complaints before them.

How do the Consumer Protection Councils differ from the Central Authority?

The councils, which the 2019 Act carried over from the 1986 scheme in Chapter II, are advisory bodies for the promotion and protection of consumer rights, constituted at the Centre, in the states and in the districts. The Authority is an executive body with inquiry, investigation and order-making powers. The councils deliberate; the Authority acts.

The candid difficulty with the Authority is capacity, and the article should state it plainly. A regulator armed with recall and penalty powers across every product and service in the Indian economy will be tested against an investigative staff that is small beside the field it polices, and its output has to be described with attribution rather than asserted as effective or ineffective in the abstract. Its reported enforcement includes directions against misleading advertisements across sectors and, in one widely reported order, a penalty of ten lakh rupees imposed on the ride-hailing platform Rapido for misleading advertisements and unfair trade practices, with a direction to refund affected customers. The guidelines on misleading advertisements and on dark patterns are, on any view, a substantial exercise of the Section 18 power, because they convert open-textured prohibitions into named and therefore contestable standards. Whether the institution develops the investigative depth of the regulators it was modelled on is a question the statute cannot answer; what the statute settled is that the office exists, that it may move first, and that no consumer has to be found before it does.

The advertisement jurisdiction and the endorser question

Section 21 is the provision by which the Authority’s existence is most often felt in public, because it governs the advertisement rather than the transaction. Where the Authority is satisfied, after investigation, that an advertisement is false or misleading and prejudicial to the interest of any consumer, or in contravention of consumer rights, it may direct the concerned trader, manufacturer, endorser, advertiser or publisher to discontinue the advertisement or to modify it in the manner and within the time specified. Where it considers a penalty necessary, it may impose on the manufacturer or the endorser a penalty which may extend to ten lakh rupees, and for every subsequent contravention a penalty which may extend to fifty lakh rupees. It may further prohibit the endorser from making any endorsement of any product or service for a period extending to one year, and for a subsequent contravention for a period extending to three years. A person who publishes, or is a party to the publication of, a misleading advertisement may be penalised up to ten lakh rupees under Section 21(4), subject to the protection in Section 21(6) for a person who proves that the publication was made in the ordinary course of business. Behind the civil penalty stands Section 89, under which a manufacturer or service provider who causes a false or misleading advertisement prejudicial to the interests of consumers commits an offence punishable with imprisonment extending to two years and a fine extending to ten lakh rupees, and for a subsequent offence imprisonment extending to five years and a fine extending to fifty lakh rupees; by Section 92, cognizance of the offence can be taken only on a complaint filed by the Authority or an officer it authorises, which keeps the criminal law in this field behind a regulatory gate.

The endorser provisions attracted more public attention than any other part of the Act, and they deserve the two statements the stance of this series requires. The case for endorser liability is that an endorsement by a person of public standing is itself a commercial input: it is the reason a large class of consumers acts on the advertisement, it is bought and paid for precisely because it moves purchasing decisions, and a legal regime that penalises the manufacturer while leaving untouched the person whose credibility did the selling protects the wrong party. The design is not, on this view, strict liability for a famous face. Section 21(5) provides that no endorser shall be liable to a penalty under the section if the endorser has exercised due diligence to verify the veracity of the claims made in the advertisement regarding the product or service endorsed, and the 2022 Guidelines elaborate the content of that diligence by requiring that an endorsement rest on adequate information about, or experience with, the goods or services concerned. The Standing Committee that examined the 2015 Bill had recommended that misleading advertisements and their endorsers be brought within the penalty scheme, and Ram Vilas Paswan, piloting the 2019 Bill, defended the provision on the floor on the footing that a person who lends a name to a claim shares responsibility for it.

The case against is that an endorser is rarely in a position to verify the technical claims that matter: the composition of a health drink, the efficacy of a financial product, the testing history of a device. The statutory standard of due diligence is not defined in the Act, and its meaning has to be assembled from the Guidelines and from the Authority’s practice, which leaves the conscientious endorser uncertain about what checking is enough. The prohibition power compounds the objection, because a bar on endorsing any product or service for up to three years is a severe economic sanction on a profession, imposed by an administrative authority after an administrative investigation, subject to an appeal to the National Commission but not to a trial. Both statements are honestly held, and the provision’s real test lies in the pattern of its use: a penalty scheme that reaches the endorser who sold a claim no reasonable check could have passed disciplines the market for endorsements, while a scheme applied to endorsers who asked the obvious questions would convert a defensible accountability into a tax on celebrity. The Act supplies the instrument and the defence; the balance between them is being struck in the Authority’s orders, and it is there, rather than in the section, that the argument will be settled.

The second addition: product liability

Chapter VI, Sections 82 to 87, writes a product liability code into Indian statute for the first time. The 1986 Act had allowed compensation where goods were defective, but it had no concept of liability for harm caused by a product as such, no allocation of responsibility among manufacturer, seller and service provider, and no statutory treatment of design defects, failures to warn, or breach of an express warranty as grounds of liability independent of negligence. Chapter VI supplies the whole apparatus. The definitions clause defines harm, for this chapter, to include damage to property other than the product itself, personal injury, illness or death, and mental agony or emotional distress attendant on personal injury, illness or damage to property; it excludes harm to the product itself, damage to property consisting of the product, and loss on account of breach of warranty conditions or commercial or economic loss. A product liability action may be brought by a complainant before the appropriate commission under Section 83, and the claimant must establish one of the statutory conditions for the category of defendant sued; the chapter does not ask the claimant to prove negligence as a general matter, and in one case, the express warranty, it expressly refuses to let the defendant answer by proving an absence of negligence or fraud.

Section 84 states the liability of the product manufacturer on five grounds: the product contains a manufacturing defect; the product is defective in design; there is a deviation from manufacturing specifications; the product does not conform to an express warranty; or the product fails to contain adequate instructions of correct usage to prevent harm, or a warning regarding improper or incorrect usage. Section 84(2) adds that a manufacturer is liable even if it proves that it was not negligent or fraudulent in making the express warranty. Section 85 states the liability of a product service provider on four grounds: the service was faulty, imperfect, deficient or inadequate in quality, nature or manner of performance as required by law, contract or otherwise; there was an act of omission or commission, negligence, or a conscious withholding of information, which caused harm; the provider did not issue adequate instructions or warnings to prevent harm; or the service did not conform to an express warranty or the terms and conditions of the contract.

Section 86 is the provision that distributes the risk along the supply chain, and it is drafted against the seller rather than for him. A product seller who is not the manufacturer is liable only where a connecting factor exists: the seller exercised substantial control over the designing, testing, manufacturing, packaging or labelling of the product that caused harm; or altered or modified the product, and the alteration or modification was the substantial factor in causing the harm; or made an express warranty of the product independent of the manufacturer’s warranty and the product failed to conform to it; or the manufacturer is not known, or, if known, cannot be served with notice or process or is not subject to the law in force in India or an order against the manufacturer cannot be enforced; or the seller failed to exercise reasonable care in assembling, inspecting or maintaining the product, or failed to pass on the manufacturer’s warnings or instructions regarding the dangers involved or the proper usage of the product. The structure is deliberate. A passive retailer who merely passed an unopened box along the chain is not, without more, the insurer of its contents; a seller who private-labels, modifies, warrants, or stands between the consumer and an unreachable manufacturer is.

Section 87 then states the exceptions, and they are broad enough to shape the chapter’s practical reach. By Section 87(1), a product liability action cannot be brought against a product seller where, at the time of the harm, the product was misused, altered or modified; commentators on the Act, including the columnists who analysed the chapter in Bar and Bench, have noted the oddity that the subsection speaks only of the seller, although misuse and alteration are answers that a manufacturer would equally expect to raise. In an action founded on failure to provide adequate instructions or warnings, Section 87 protects the manufacturer where the product was purchased by an employer for use at a workplace and the manufacturer had given the warnings to the employer; where the product is a component part meant to be used in another product and the necessary warnings were given to the purchaser of the component; where the product is one legally meant to be used or dispensed only by or under the supervision of an expert and the manufacturer employed reasonable means to give warnings to the expert; and where the complainant was under the influence of alcohol or of a prescription drug not prescribed by a medical practitioner at the time of the harm. The manufacturer is likewise protected where the danger is obvious, or commonly known to the user or consumer, or ought to have been known considering the characteristics of the product. The honest assessment of the chapter is therefore double-sided. It is a genuine doctrinal addition: it names the grounds, allocates them by defendant, and relieves the claimant of proving negligence across most of the field. It is also a chapter whose exceptions, particularly for sellers, mean that the practical exposure falls mainly on manufacturers, and the burden and standard of proof on the open-textured grounds, defective design above all, are matters on which the commissions’ jurisprudence is still developing and will decide how much of the promise the text keeps.

The third addition: mediation inside the statute

The 1986 Act contained no settlement mechanism of its own; a compromise between the parties was simply a fact a forum could record. Chapter V of the 2019 Act, Sections 74 to 81, builds mediation into the statute as a stage of the proceeding itself. Section 37 provides the doorway: at the first hearing of a complaint after its admission, or at any later stage, if it appears to the commission that there exist elements of a settlement which may be acceptable to the parties, the commission may, except in the classes of case prescribed, direct the parties to give their consent in writing, within five days, to refer the matter for mediation, and on receiving that consent it refers the matter accordingly. The reference is consensual, and the classes of dispute unsuited to mediation, such as those involving allegations of a grave and malignant nature, are left to be prescribed; mediation under the Act is an offer the statute makes to the parties, not a diversion imposed on them.

Section 74 requires the establishment of a consumer mediation cell attached to each District Commission, each State Commission and the National Commission, maintained by the respective government, and charged with keeping the records of empanelment and of the matters referred and settled. Section 75 provides for the empanelment of mediators by the commissions, on the recommendation of a selection committee, from persons meeting the qualifications, training and experience the regulations prescribe. Section 76 governs the nomination of a mediator from the panel for a particular dispute; Section 77 makes it the mediator’s duty to disclose any personal, professional or financial interest in the outcome and any circumstance that may give rise to a justifiable doubt about independence or impartiality; and Section 78 requires the replacement of a mediator where the commission is satisfied, on information received and after hearing the mediator, that replacement is warranted. Section 79 places the mediation in the cell attached to the referring commission and directs the mediator to have regard to the rights and obligations of the parties, the usages of trade, the circumstances giving rise to the dispute and other relevant factors, guided by the principles of natural justice, within the time and manner the regulations specify.

The settlement machinery is in Sections 80 and 81. If an agreement is reached on all or some of the issues, its terms are reduced to writing and signed by the parties or their authorised representatives, and the mediator prepares a settlement report and forwards the signed agreement with the report to the commission. If no agreement is reached, or the mediator is of the opinion that settlement is not possible, the mediator reports that instead. The commission must then act within seven days of receiving the settlement report: it passes an order recording the settlement and disposes of the matter accordingly; where the settlement is partial, it records the settled issues and continues to hear the rest; and where mediation has failed, it continues to hear all the issues. An order recording a settlement is an order made on the parties’ own agreement, and the chapter provides no appeal against it, which is the necessary corollary of the design: a party who has signed the terms cannot be handed an appellate route out of them. The significance of the chapter is institutional rather than dramatic. It gives the commissions a structured way to convert the large class of consumer disputes that are really about a refund, a repair or an apology into concluded business within the same proceeding, instead of leaving settlement to corridor negotiation outside the record.

Mediation and the disposal problem

The mediation chapter was Parliament’s answer to a fact about the commissions that no change of name or jurisdiction could alter: they carry more complaints than their benches can hear quickly, and every official review of the system describes the pendency as large and the disposal rate as hostage to vacancies, adjournments and the sheer volume of small claims. Settlement is the obvious release valve, and it was not unknown to the old system, which could record a compromise the parties brought to it, while Lok Adalats organised under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 could take up consumer matters among the cases referred to them. What the 1986 Act lacked was a settlement stage inside its own proceeding, and that is the specific lack Chapter V supplies: a reference the commission itself proposes at the first hearing, a cell of its own in which the mediation sits, a panel of mediators it empanels, a report it receives, and an order it must pass within seven days. The difference between a compromise the parties happen to reach and a mediation the statute organises is the difference between an accident and a system: the organised version generates a record of what was referred, what settled and what failed, and it puts the commission’s authority behind the invitation to settle, which changes the behaviour of a trader who would otherwise treat delay as a free option.

The limits of the device are written into its design and should be stated as plainly as its promise. Mediation under the Act is consensual at the threshold: the commission may propose, but the reference requires the parties’ written consent, and a trader who calculates that the complainant will tire before the hearing may simply refuse. It is unsuited, by the classes of case left to be prescribed, to disputes that turn on contested fact-finding of a grave kind or on a point of principle that needs a precedent, and a settlement, once recorded, binds without appeal, which is finality for the party who settled wisely and a hard outcome for the party who settled under pressure of exhaustion. Its realistic contribution is therefore in the broad middle of the docket: the refund resisted out of inertia, the repair promised and postponed, the insurance repudiation that a facilitated conversation can move, where the distance between the parties is money and time rather than right and wrong. Measured against the disposal problem, that middle is large enough to matter, and the chapter’s success will show itself not in any single settlement but in whether the commissions build the habit of proposing the reference at the first hearing, which is the moment the statute chose and the moment at which delay has not yet become the trader’s strategy.

The fourth addition, first part: electronic commerce

The 2019 Act brings electronic commerce inside consumer law by definition and by rule-making power rather than by a self-contained code. The definitions clause defines e-commerce as buying or selling goods or services, including digital products, over a digital or electronic network, and, as already noted, writes online transactions into the definition of a consumer in Section 2(7). The duties of the trade are then prescribed by the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, notified on 23 July 2020 under the Act’s rule-making power, which distinguish the obligations of e-commerce entities generally, of marketplace entities that provide a platform to other sellers, and of inventory entities that sell their own goods to consumers.

The general duties in Rule 4 of the 2020 Rules are the compliance floor for every entity in the field. An e-commerce entity must appoint a nodal person of contact, or an alternate senior designated functionary, who is resident in India, to ensure compliance with the Act and the Rules; it must display on its platform its legal name, the principal geographic address of its headquarters and all its branch offices, the name and details of its website, and the contact details of its customer care and of its grievance officer; it must establish an adequate grievance redressal mechanism and appoint a grievance officer, whose name, contact details and designation are displayed, and who must acknowledge the receipt of a consumer complaint within forty-eight hours and redress the complaint within one month from the date of receipt; where it offers imported goods or services, it must name the importer; it must not adopt any unfair trade practice, must not manipulate the price of goods or services to gain an unreasonable profit, must not discriminate between consumers of the same class or make an arbitrary classification of consumers affecting their rights, and must not impose cancellation charges on a consumer who cancels after confirming a purchase unless it bears similar charges when it cancels the purchase itself. Rule 5 adds the marketplace duties: to display the details of the sellers on the platform, to provide a ticket number for complaints so that a consumer can track the status of a grievance, to disclose the terms of the platform’s contracts with sellers in the respects the Rule specifies, and to take a written undertaking from sellers that the descriptions, images and content pertaining to goods and services are accurate. Rule 6 addresses the inventory model, in which the entity itself owns the goods it sells, and treats such an entity with the responsibilities of a seller, including liability where the goods it sells as its own are defective, so that a platform cannot lower its exposure by changing its corporate shape. Sellers offering goods through a marketplace carry their own duties of fair description, price display and grievance handling under the Rules, and the information an entity must present to a consumer before a purchase, including the total price in a single figure with its breakup, return and refund terms, warranty and guarantee, delivery terms and the country of origin of the goods, is prescribed so that the decision to buy is made on disclosed terms.

The rules were followed by a round of proposed amendment that this article must describe with care, because the error other accounts make is to cite the draft as law. Draft amendments to the E-Commerce Rules were released for public comment in June 2021, proposing among other things a prohibition on certain flash sales, a fall-back liability on a marketplace entity where a seller on its platform fails to deliver what was promised, a requirement to appoint a chief compliance officer and a resident grievance officer, and registration of e-commerce entities with the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade. The proposals generated substantial comment from industry, much of it directed at the breadth of the fall-back liability and the flash sale prohibition, and they were not carried into the notified rules; the operative text remains the Rules of 2020. The distinction matters in practice, because a compliance position built on the draft would misstate the duties that a marketplace in fact bears, and because the episode shows the centre of gravity of e-commerce consumer regulation settling in the rule-making power of the Act rather than in the Act itself.

The fourth addition, second part: the unfair contract

The last of the four additions is the quietest and may prove the most used. The 1986 Act allowed a forum to respond to an unfair trade practice, but a contract term was not, without more, a ground of complaint, and no forum had power in terms to strike a term down. The Law Commission of India had recommended legislation addressed to unfair contract terms, procedural and substantive, in a report accompanied by a draft Bill, and the recommendation had waited for a vehicle. The 2019 Act supplied one. Section 2(6) makes an allegation that an unfair contract has been entered into a head of complaint, and Section 2(46) defines an unfair contract as a contract between a manufacturer or trader or service provider on the one hand and a consumer on the other, having such terms as cause a significant change in the rights of the consumer, including the following: requiring manifestly excessive security deposits to be given by a consumer for the performance of contractual obligations; imposing any penalty on the consumer for a breach of contract which is wholly disproportionate to the loss occurred due to such breach to the other party; refusing to accept early repayment of debts on payment of applicable penalty; entitling a party to the contract to terminate the contract unilaterally without reasonable cause; permitting, or having the effect of permitting, one party to assign the contract to the detriment of the consumer without the consumer’s consent; and imposing on the consumer any unreasonable charge, obligation or condition which puts the consumer to disadvantage. The list is inclusive rather than exhaustive: the governing test is the significant change in the consumer’s rights, and the six heads are the cases Parliament was sure of.

Each head answers a documented grievance of standard form contracting. The excessive deposit head answers the builder and the lessor who hold sums out of all proportion to the obligation secured. The disproportionate penalty head answers the liquidated damages clause set at a figure bearing no relation to loss. The early repayment head answers the lender who refuses a prepayment, or accepts it only on terms that nullify the benefit of repaying, a practice squarely within the lending relationship the definition was drafted to reach. The unilateral termination head answers the service contract that one side may end at will and the other may not. The assignment head answers the transfer of a housing or finance contract to a stranger to the original bargain, to the consumer’s detriment and without consent. The closing head, unreasonable charges and conditions that disadvantage the consumer, is the general clause that keeps the definition open to forms of one-sided drafting that the five specific heads do not capture.

The striking feature of the scheme is where the power to act on the definition is placed. A complaint against an unfair contract lies, in the first instance, only to the State Commission, where the value of the goods or services paid as consideration does not exceed ten crore rupees, under Section 47(1)(a)(ii), and to the National Commission where it exceeds ten crore rupees, under Section 58(1)(a)(ii). The District Commission, which hears the great majority of consumer complaints, has no original jurisdiction over unfair contracts. Section 49(2) then provides that the State Commission may declare any term of a contract which is unfair to any consumer to be null and void, and Section 59(2) confers the corresponding power on the National Commission. The design choice is intelligible: the annulment of a standard term affects every contract on the same template, and Parliament placed the power in the two higher tiers, whose decisions structure the market below them. Its cost is equally plain: the consumer with a small contract and an unfair term must go to the state capital rather than the district town to have the term itself annulled, even though the same facts, pleaded as an unfair trade practice or a deficiency, could be run in the District Commission for compensation. The remedy is real, little used relative to its reach, and structurally reserved to the tiers least accessible to the smallest claimants, and those two propositions together describe its place in the Act.

Who can act, and on whose complaint

The four additions change the cast of consumer law, and the change is best seen in one place. Under the 1986 Act, every route into the system began with a complainant, and the complainant’s stake set the ceiling on what the system could see. Under the 2019 Act, the complainant remains, joined by an association, by a class of consumers with the same interest, and by a regulator that needs no one’s loss to begin. The table below states what each actor may set in motion.

Actor	What the actor may set in motion	Before which body	On what grounds	What the outcome can be
An individual consumer	A complaint seeking refund, replacement, removal of a defect or deficiency, and compensation	The District, State or National Commission, according to the consideration paid	Defect in goods, deficiency in service, unfair trade practice, unfair contract, overcharging, or a product liability claim	The reliefs the commission may grant, including compensation, interest and costs, and, in the higher tiers, annulment of an unfair term
A voluntary consumer association	A complaint on behalf of a consumer, or of consumers generally, and a class complaint where numerous consumers share the same interest	The District, State or National Commission, according to the consideration paid	Any ground open to a consumer complainant	Orders against the trader or provider for the benefit of the consumers concerned, including relief distributed across a class
The Central Authority, of its own motion	A preliminary inquiry, and on a prima facie case an investigation, into a violation of consumer rights, an unfair trade practice or a misleading advertisement	The Authority itself, acting through the Director-General or a District Collector	Information received, or the Authority’s own motion, where the matter is prejudicial to the public interest or to consumers as a class	Recall or withdrawal of goods or services, reimbursement of prices, discontinuation of the practice, advertisement directions and penalties, or referral to a sectoral regulator
The Central Authority, on a complaint or a direction	The same inquiry and investigation, set in motion from outside the Authority	The Authority itself, and, where adjudication is required, a complaint filed by the Authority before a commission	A complaint or information from any source, or a direction of the Central Government	The regulatory outcomes above, and, before a commission, the adjudicatory reliefs a complainant may obtain
A product liability claimant	A product liability action for harm caused by a defective product or a deficient product-related service	The commission with jurisdiction over the claim	One of the statutory conditions in Sections 84 to 86, against the manufacturer, seller or service provider respectively	Compensation for the harm proved, subject to the exceptions in Section 87

The enlarged definition of an unfair trade practice

What counts as an unfair trade practice under the definition the 2019 Act enlarged?

The 2019 Act kept the established heads of unfair trade practice, false representation, false allurement of price, misleading warranty claims and disparagement among them, and added three that belong to the transactional present: not issuing a bill, cash memo or receipt; refusing to take back defective goods or to refund; and disclosing a consumer’s personal information given in confidence.

Section 2(47) states the three additions precisely. Clause (vii) makes it an unfair trade practice not to issue a bill or cash memo or receipt for the goods sold or services rendered. Clause (viii) covers refusing to take back or withdraw defective goods, or to withdraw or discontinue a deficient service, and to refund the consideration, within the period stipulated in the bill or cash memo or receipt, or in the absence of such stipulation within thirty days. Clause (ix) covers disclosing to another person any personal information given in confidence by the consumer, unless the disclosure is made in accordance with law or in the public interest. The enlarged definition also retains the older head directed at scarcity practices, the permitting of the hoarding or destruction of goods, or a refusal to sell goods or make them available or to provide a service, with a view to raising the cost of those or similar goods or services. Read together, the additions convert three everyday experiences of the digital and informal marketplace, the missing bill, the refused refund and the leaked phone number, from discourtesies into statutory violations that a commission can remedy and the Authority can pursue as a class matter. The Act likewise defines a misleading advertisement to include an advertisement which falsely describes a product or service, gives a false guarantee of its nature, substance or quality, conveys an express or implied representation that would constitute an unfair trade practice if made by the manufacturer or seller, or deliberately conceals important information; it is that definition which the advertisement jurisdiction in Section 21 and the offence in Section 89 both engage.

The offences that stand behind the additions

A replacement statute that creates a regulator and a liability chapter must also say what is criminal, and Chapter VII draws that line in four provisions. Section 88 penalises non-compliance with a direction of the Central Authority under Section 20 or Section 21 with imprisonment extending to six months, or a fine extending to twenty lakh rupees, or both; it is the provision that makes the Authority’s directions orders rather than requests. Section 89, already noted, makes the causing of a false or misleading advertisement by a manufacturer or service provider an offence graded between a first and a subsequent conviction. Section 92 confines cognizance of the offences under Sections 88 and 89 to complaints filed by the Authority or an officer it authorises, and Section 93 permits the compounding of those offences on payment of a sum not exceeding the maximum fine, with a bar on compounding a repeat offence committed within three years of an earlier composition.

Sections 90 and 91 address the physical safety of the market, and they are graded by consequence with a care the rest of the chapter does not attempt. Section 90 punishes whoever manufactures for sale, stores, sells, distributes or imports a product containing an adulterant, an adulterant being any material, including extraneous matter, employed or used for making a product unsafe, and grievous hurt bearing the meaning assigned in Section 320 of the Indian Penal Code. Where the act results in no injury to the consumer, the punishment extends to six months’ imprisonment and a fine extending to one lakh rupees. Where it causes injury not amounting to grievous hurt, it extends to one year’s imprisonment and a fine extending to three lakh rupees. Where it causes grievous hurt, it extends to seven years’ imprisonment and a fine extending to five lakh rupees. Where it results in death, the imprisonment shall not be less than seven years and may extend to imprisonment for life, with a fine that shall not be less than ten lakh rupees. Section 91 applies the same architecture to spurious goods, defined in Section 2(43) as goods which are falsely claimed to be genuine, with one structural difference: it has no tier for the case of no injury, beginning instead with injury not amounting to grievous hurt at one year and three lakh rupees, rising through grievous hurt at seven years and five lakh rupees, to death at a minimum of seven years extending to life with a fine of not less than ten lakh rupees. For both sections, the offences of grievous hurt and death are cognizable and non-bailable, and the convicting court may, on a first conviction, suspend for up to two years any licence issued to the offender under any law, and on a second or subsequent conviction cancel the licence outright. The licence consequence is the provision with the sharpest commercial edge, because it attaches the survival of the business itself to the safety of what it sells.

The two sections also have to be read against the sectoral penal regimes they overlap. Adulteration of food is punishable under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 through its own ladder of penalties and its licensing machinery, and spurious drugs are punishable under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 with sentences of the first severity. Sections 90 and 91 do not repeal or absorb those regimes; Section 100 keeps them standing beside this Act, and the work the consumer statute adds is of a different kind. The sectoral statutes are organised around the licence and the standard, and their enforcement belongs to the inspectorates of the food and drugs administrations. The consumer offences are organised around the consumer’s injury, graded by it rung by rung, and they give the criminal law of the marketplace a general provision that operates across product classes, food, cosmetics, electronics, toys, for which no single sectoral inspectorate speaks. A consignment of adulterated food may therefore attract the food authority’s penalty process for the licensing wrong and a prosecution under Section 90 for the injurious wrong, and the two proceedings answer different questions. Whether the overlap produces complementary enforcement or duplicated effort in a given case depends on the administrations involved, but the legislative judgment is clear enough: the grading of punishment by harm done to the consumer was thought important enough to state in the consumer statute itself, rather than left to be inferred from statutes written for other purposes.

The commissions, and the litigation over who may sit on them

The adjudicatory arm that the 2019 Act inherited was reconstituted on judicial lines, and the reconstitution produced the Act’s most consequential litigation to date. The District Commission is presided over by a person who is, has been or is qualified to be a District Judge; the State Commission by a person who is or has been a Judge of a High Court, appointed after consultation with the Chief Justice of that High Court; and the National Commission by a person who is or has been a Judge of the Supreme Court, appointed after consultation with the Chief Justice of India. The qualifications, method of recruitment, procedure of appointment, term of office, resignation and removal of the presidents and members of the State and District Commissions were left to rules, and the Central Government made the Consumer Protection (Qualification for Appointment, Method of Recruitment, Procedure of Appointment, Term of Office, Resignation and Removal of the President and Members of the State Commission and District Commission) Rules, 2020 under Section 101. Those Rules prescribed, for the non-judicial members who form the working strength of the commissions, a minimum professional experience of twenty years for the State Commission and fifteen years for the District Commission, and they provided for selection without a written examination, through a selection committee in which the executive had the dominant voice.

The Rules were challenged in the Bombay High Court, where Dr. Mahindra Bhaskar Limaye’s petition succeeded in part: the Nagpur Bench struck down the provisions prescribing the twenty-year and fifteen-year experience requirements, the provision dispensing with a written examination, and a provision of the selection committee rule, as unconstitutional. The Union of India appealed, and in Ministry of Consumer Affairs v. Dr. Mahindra Bhaskar Limaye, decided on 3 March 2023, a Bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justice M.R. Shah and Justice M.M. Sundresh upheld the High Court. The Court reasoned that the commissions are quasi-judicial authorities whose standards should be as nearly as possible those expected of the judiciary, that a selection process without any written assessment of merit left appointments exposed to arbitrariness, and that experience thresholds of twenty and fifteen years excluded the pool of competent younger candidates without advancing the quality of the bench. Exercising its power under Article 142 of the Constitution to do complete justice, the Court directed that, until the Rules were amended, a person holding a bachelor’s degree from a recognised university, of ability, integrity and standing, with special knowledge and professional experience of not less than ten years in consumer affairs, law, public affairs, administration, economics, commerce or allied fields, be treated as qualified for appointment as president and member of the State and District Commissions, and that appointments be made on the basis of performance in two written papers, with qualifying marks of fifty per cent, together with a viva voce of fifty marks.

The story did not end there, and its continuation is instructive. Fresh challenges attacked Rule 6(1), which composed the selection committee without judicial dominance, and Rule 10(2), which fixed a term of four years for members, and the Bombay High Court struck both down, relying on the tribunal jurisprudence of Rojer Mathew and the Madras Bar Association line of cases, which holds that bodies exercising judicial functions must be insulated from executive control in appointment and tenure. In Ganeshkumar Rajeshwarrao Selukar v. Mahendra Bhaskar Limaye, decided in May 2025 by a Bench of Justice Abhay S. Oka and Justice M.M. Sundresh, the Supreme Court declined to disturb the striking down of the two Rules, clarified that the written examination directed in 2023 is required for the non-judicial members of the State and District Commissions and not for the posts of President of the State Commission, judicial members of the State Commission, or President of the District Commission, accepted that the presidency of a District Commission be restricted to serving or retired District Judges, treated a term of five years as the appropriate tenure, directed the Union to frame new Rules, and directed the states to complete recruitment under the new Rules within four months of their notification. It also directed the Union to consider the feasibility of a permanent adjudicatory forum for consumer disputes, with permanent members and staff, of the kind the tribunal cases have long urged in place of repeated short-tenure appointments.

The litigation also carried a practical cost that belongs in any honest account of the Act’s early working. While the governing rules were under challenge, recruitment to the commissions in the affected states was overtaken by the dispute, and benches that the statute assumes to be filled sat short of their strength, in a system whose disposal rate is a direct function of how many presidents and members are in post. The episode is the standing illustration of a truth the series has met in other clusters: the quality of a statute’s appointment machinery is not a lawyer’s refinement but an operating condition of the rights the statute creates, and a defect in the rules is paid for in the currency of delayed complaints by the consumers the Act exists to serve.

The significance of the Limaye litigation for this article is structural. The 2019 Act is a statute about the distribution of power between complainants, traders and the state, and its own adjudicatory arm became the site of the same question: who chooses the decision-makers, and on what demonstrated merit. A replacement statute can create a regulator and a liability chapter by enactment; the independence of the commissions that work the statute had to be defended in court against the rule-making of the government that administered it. Readers assessing what the 2019 Act added should count the episode on both sides of the ledger: the Act’s design assumed commissions of judicial character, and the courts required the appointment machinery to match the assumption.

One advertisement, three proceedings

The additions interlock, and the clearest way to see the machine whole is to follow a single misleading advertisement through it. Take an advertisement that claims, falsely, a health benefit for a food supplement, published nationally by the manufacturer and fronted by a well-known endorser. Under the 1986 Act, the advertisement mattered only if a buyer sued: a consumer who had purchased the product in reliance on the claim could file a complaint alleging an unfair trade practice, and the forum could award compensation to that buyer. The advertisement itself, and the thousands of buyers who would never file, were outside the frame.

Under the 2019 Act the same advertisement can set three distinct proceedings in motion, each answering a different question. The first is regulatory. The Authority may act on information, on a complaint from any quarter, on a direction of the Central Government or of its own motion, hold a preliminary inquiry under Section 19 and, on finding a prima facie case, direct an investigation by the Director-General or a District Collector. If the investigation bears out the falsity, Section 21 lets the Authority direct that the advertisement be discontinued or modified, penalise the manufacturer and the endorser up to ten lakh rupees, or fifty lakh for a subsequent contravention, and prohibit the endorser from endorsing for up to a year, or three years on repetition, subject always to the endorser’s due diligence defence under Section 21(5) and to an appeal to the National Commission under Section 24. If the product is also unsafe, Section 20 adds recall, withdrawal and reimbursement of the price. No buyer has to be found, named or compensated for any of this to happen, because the wrong being addressed is the practice.

The second proceeding is criminal, and it is deliberately kept behind the regulator’s gate. If the manufacturer caused the false advertisement, Section 89 exposes it to prosecution and to imprisonment of up to two years with a fine of up to ten lakh rupees, rising to five years and fifty lakh rupees for a subsequent offence, but Section 92 forbids a court to take cognizance except on a complaint by the Authority or its authorised officer. The individual buyer cannot set the criminal law in motion under this Act, and the design is a considered one: it prevents the criminal provision from becoming a private bargaining counter while reserving prosecution for the cases the regulator judges grave enough to carry it. The third proceeding is the old one, preserved and improved. The buyer who relied on the claim and suffered loss may file a complaint before the commission with jurisdiction, in the district where the buyer resides under Section 34(2)(d), pleading an unfair trade practice and, if the supplement caused injury, a product liability action under Chapter VI into the bargain; and at the first hearing the commission may, with the written consent of both sides, refer the dispute to mediation under Section 37, where the ordinary outcome, a refund and an apology recorded in an order within seven days of the settlement report, is available without a contested hearing. The three proceedings do not merge. The penalty under Section 21 is payable to the state and compensates nobody; the commission’s compensation compensates the buyer and punishes nobody; the prosecution punishes and compensates nobody either. That separation of functions, which the 1986 Act could not express because it had only one forum and one trigger, is the mature form of the statute the 2019 Act built.

How a product liability claim is assembled

Because Chapter VI is the Act’s largest doctrinal addition, its internal mechanics deserve a closer reading than the summary of grounds allows. A product liability claim begins with the definition of the action: Section 83 permits a complainant to bring a product liability action against a product manufacturer, a product service provider or a product seller, as the case may be, for harm caused to the complainant. The claimant elects the defendant, and the election matters, because the grounds differ by category and the proof follows the ground. Against a manufacturer, the natural grounds are a manufacturing defect, where the individual unit departed from the maker’s own standard, and a deviation from manufacturing specifications, which is the same idea stated from the specification side. A design defect is the harder ground: it asserts that every unit made to the design is unreasonably dangerous, and proving it ordinarily requires the claimant to show that the design’s risks outweighed its utility or that a reasonable alternative design existed, questions on which expert evidence will usually decide the case and on which the commissions’ practice is still forming. The express warranty ground is the most claimant-friendly in the chapter, because Section 84(2) forecloses the answer that the warranty was made honestly and carefully: if the product does not conform to what was warranted, liability follows. The failure-to-warn ground turns on the adequacy of the instructions of correct usage and the warnings against improper usage that accompanied the product, and it is here that Section 87’s protections for the manufacturer, the employer’s workplace purchase, the component supplied with warnings to its purchaser, the expert-use product, the complainant under the influence, and the danger that was obvious or commonly known, do their work.

Against a service provider, the grounds in Section 85 track the older language of deficiency and add the withholding of information and the failure to warn, so that a repairer, an installer or a maintenance contractor whose work causes harm is judged in product liability terms rather than being pursued only for deficient service. Against a seller, Section 86 confines liability to the connecting factors already described, and the claimant’s real forensic task is to establish one of them: that the seller controlled the design or the labelling, as a private-label retailer does; that the seller altered the product and the alteration was the substantial factor in the harm; that the seller gave its own warranty which the product failed; that the manufacturer is unknown or beyond the reach of Indian process; or that the seller was careless in assembling, inspecting or maintaining the product, or failed to pass on the manufacturer’s warnings. The harm claimed must fall within the statutory definition, which means the claimant must plead injury, illness, death, damage to property other than the product itself, or the mental agony attendant on those, and must keep out of the claim the value of the ruined product itself and any purely commercial loss, which the definition excludes and which must be recovered, if at all, under the ordinary heads of defect and deficiency. A single incident can therefore ground two claims of different shapes in the same complaint: a product liability action for the injury, and a defect claim for the product. Nothing in the chapter displaces the older route, and Section 100, which provides that the Act is in addition to and not in derogation of any other law, preserves the claimant’s parallel remedies in tort and under the sectoral safety statutes, although the practical centre of gravity for a consumer-scale injury is the commission, with its summary procedure and its power, where a defect cannot be determined without analysis or testing, to have a sample sent to an appropriate laboratory and to proceed on the report.

The definition of a consumer at its edges

The four additions operate on persons the Act counts as consumers, and the edges of Section 2(7) decide more cases than its centre. The centre is plain: a person who buys goods, or hires or avails of services, for a consideration that has been paid or promised or partly paid and partly promised, or under a system of deferred payment, and any user of the goods, or beneficiary of the services, with the approval of the buyer or the person who hired them. The first edge is the commercial purpose exclusion: a person who obtains goods for resale, or for any commercial purpose, is not a consumer, and the same exclusion applies to services availed for a commercial purpose. The exclusion is then cut back by the explanation carried through the case law of the old Act, that commercial purpose does not include use by a person of goods bought and used by him, and services availed by him, exclusively for the purpose of earning his livelihood by means of self-employment, so that the taxi owner-driver and the tailor with a single machine remain consumers while the fleet operator and the factory do not. The second edge is gratuitousness: the definition of service in Section 2(42) excludes the rendering of a service free of charge and a service under a contract of personal service, so the recipient of a wholly free service, and the employer in relation to an employee, stand outside the Act’s protection, while a service paid for in part, or paid for by a third party such as an insurer or an employer under a scheme, remains within it because consideration has moved from someone. The third edge is the one the 2019 Act itself moved: by writing offline and online transactions, teleshopping, direct selling and multi-level marketing into the clause, it removed the argument, occasionally run under the old Act, that a purchase concluded without a shop, a bill or a face-to-face seller fell outside the statute. The consumer associations, the Central Government and the State Governments, the Central Authority, one or more consumers having the same interest with the permission of the commission, and the legal heir or representative of a deceased consumer complete the statutory list of complainants in Section 2(5), and it is that list, read with the table above, that defines who may start a case in the system the 2019 Act built.

The Authority among regulators

A new regulator does not enter an empty field, and the 2019 Act is careful, in two provisions, about the company the Authority keeps. The first is Section 19(2): where, after preliminary inquiry, the Authority is of the opinion that a matter is to be dealt with by a regulator established under any other law, it may refer the matter to that regulator with its report. The second is Section 100: the provisions of the Act are in addition to, and not in derogation of, the provisions of any other law for the time being in force. Between them, the two provisions describe a regulator designed to overlap without displacing. Food safety standards and the licensing of food businesses belong to the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India under its own statute; the quality and licensing of drugs and cosmetics to the drug control machinery; the declarations on packaged commodities to legal metrology; the content of television and press advertising is also the field of the Advertising Standards Council of India’s self-regulatory code, which carries no statutory force of its own but whose findings the market treats seriously. The Authority’s distinctive province within this company is the consumer-facing wrong as such: the unfair practice, the misleading claim and the violation of the class rights in Section 2(9), wherever they occur, including in sectors that have their own regulator for other purposes. The referral power is the safety valve for the overlap, allowing a matter whose real centre is, for example, a drug licence to travel to the authority that holds the licence, while the Authority retains the advertisement and the practice. The risk the design runs is the obverse of its virtue: two regulators with concurrent sight of the same conduct may each assume the other is acting, and the published record of referrals is too thin to show how systematically the valve is used. What can be said on the text is that Parliament anticipated the collision and chose concurrence with referral over exclusive jurisdiction, which is the same choice the Act makes for complainants, who may elect between the commissions and a sectoral forum where both are open.

The subordinate legislation the Act depends on

The 2019 Act is a framework statute, and a reader who stops at its 107 sections has not reached the law that businesses actually comply with. Rule-making power is distributed by Chapter VIII: Section 101 empowers the Central Government to make rules on the long list of subjects the Act reserves to it, Section 102 empowers state governments to make rules on the subjects within their sphere, Section 103 empowers the Central Authority to make regulations consistent with the Act, and Section 104 empowers the National Commission to make regulations on its procedure and on mediation. The instruments made in the first wave, most of them effective from 20 July 2020, include the Consumer Protection (General) Rules, 2020, the Consumer Protection (Consumer Disputes Redressal Commissions) Rules, 2020, the Consumer Protection (Mediation) Rules, 2020 and the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 examined above, with the Mediation Regulations of the National Commission supplying the working detail on empanelment, conduct and the conduct of mediations that Section 79 leaves to regulations. Two lessons follow from the architecture. The first is that the Act’s substantive reach is partly delegated: the e-commerce duties, the appointment qualifications and much of the commissions’ procedure live in instruments that the government of the day can amend without returning to Parliament, which is why the description of the e-commerce regime in this article is tied to the notified text and not to the draft amendments of 2021. The second is that delegated power is where the constitutional pressure arrived: the Limaye litigation was not a challenge to the Act but to rules made under Section 101, and the Supreme Court’s intervention was an insistence that the framework statute’s assumption of judicial character in its commissions be honoured in the subordinate legislation that staffed them. A framework statute is only as good as its rules, and the 2019 Act’s first five years are, in large part, the story of its rules being written, litigated and rewritten. The later instruments confirm the pattern in fields the Act named but did not detail: the Consumer Protection (Direct Selling) Rules, 2021, notified on 28 December 2021, brought the direct selling industry, which Section 2(7) had written into the definition of a consumer’s purchase, under a code of registration, grievance and conduct obligations, prohibiting among other things the promotion of pyramid and money circulation schemes in the dress of direct selling. A statute of this kind is therefore never finished at assent; it is finished, provisionally and revisably, in its Gazette notifications, and the reader who cites the Act without its rules is citing the frame without the picture.

The debate the Bill had to survive

The 2019 Bill was the third attempt at the same statute in four years, and its passage record explains several of its design choices. The Standing Committee on Food, Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution, reporting on the 2015 Bill in April 2016, had done much of the intellectual work in advance. It recommended that the proposed regulator’s powers and functions be specified with greater precision; it addressed the structure of product liability; it supported bringing misleading advertisements and their endorsers within a penalty scheme, the recommendation from which the endorser provisions descend; and it examined the pecuniary jurisdiction proposed for the district tier. The 2018 Bill, which carried most of the same architecture, was passed by the Lok Sabha in December 2018 and then ran out of parliamentary time, lapsing with the dissolution of the Sixteenth Lok Sabha before the Rajya Sabha could take it up. The consequence is that the 2019 Bill arrived in a House that had already debated its contents in an earlier incarnation, and the questions pressed on it were the standing ones the architecture provokes rather than objections to novelty.

Three of those questions run through the passage of the 2019 Bill and repay statement, because each identifies a joint in the finished Act. The first was whether a regulator with the Authority’s width was necessary at all, or whether the commissions, better staffed, could have done the work. The government’s answer, which prevailed, was the class-harm argument: a commission cannot act until a complainant appears, and the harms of the modern marketplace, a misleading national advertisement, a hazardous product line, a platform-wide practice, are precisely the harms for which no single complainant has a sufficient stake. The second question was the endorser’s position, debated in the terms set out in the advertisement section of this article, and resolved by retaining the penalty and the prohibition while writing the due diligence defence into Section 21(5) in terms. The third was the height of the district tier’s pecuniary ceiling: the enacted figure of one crore rupees was a deliberate decision to push work downward to the tier nearest the consumer, and the 2021 Rules’ reduction of it to fifty lakh rupees, examined earlier, is the administrative sequel to that debate rather than a contradiction of it. The Bill was passed by the Lok Sabha on 30 July 2019 and by the Rajya Sabha on 6 August 2019, in each case after the clause-by-clause consideration that a replacement statute of 107 sections requires, and the speed of the final passage, nine days from introduction in the Lok Sabha to assent, is explained by the four years of committee work and debate that stood behind the text.

Four days in July: what the commencement sequence reveals

The two commencement dates of July 2020 are usually treated as a footnote, and they deserve better, because the sequence in which a replacement statute switches itself on is a map of what its drafters thought was ready and what was not. On 20 July 2020 the repeal itself took effect, the commissions chapter commenced, mediation commenced, product liability commenced, the councils chapter commenced, and the two safety offences, Sections 90 and 91, commenced. On 24 July 2020 the Central Authority chapter commenced, together with the penalty for disobeying it in Section 88, the advertisement offence in Section 89, the cognizance and compounding provisions, and the deferred definitions. The structure of the choice is visible once it is stated. Everything a complainant needed on the first morning existed on the first morning: the forums’ successors were in business, the savings clause had carried the pending files across, and the new grounds of complaint, product liability among them, could be pleaded at once. Everything that depended on an institution that did not yet exist waited the four days: there was no Authority to disobey until the Authority chapter commenced, and no purpose in commencing the penalty for disobeying it sooner. The deferred definitions tell the same story in miniature, since the definition of the Central Authority in Section 2(4) was held back to the second date while the definitions the commissions needed came in the first tranche. Staged commencement is often criticised as untidiness, and it does impose a research burden on anyone reconstructing the law at a given date. Here it functioned as the repeal’s shock absorber, guaranteeing that there was no day on which the old statute was dead and the new one’s adjudicatory machinery unborn.

The councils: the advisory inheritance

Chapter II is the part of the 2019 Act that changed least, and its modesty is informative. Section 3 provides for a Central Consumer Protection Council, chaired by the Minister in charge of consumer affairs in the Central Government, with the Minister of State as Vice-Chairperson and a membership drawn from official and non-official quarters as prescribed. Section 6 provides for a State Consumer Protection Council in every state, chaired by the corresponding state minister, and Section 8 for a District Consumer Protection Council in every district, chaired by the District Collector. Section 4 states the object of the Central Council in general terms, as the rendering of advice to the government on the promotion and protection of the rights of consumers, and Sections 7 and 9 state corresponding objects for the state and district councils. The councils meet as prescribed, deliberate on the state of consumer protection, and recommend. They have no power to summon, to inquire, to order or to penalise, and they never have had: under the 1986 Act they were the statute’s only gesture toward class-level protection, and their inability to act on the harms they discussed was one of the counts against the old scheme. The 2019 Act’s treatment of them is the cleanest evidence of its own self-understanding. Parliament did not abolish the advisory tier when it built the executive one; it left the councils in place as the forum in which consumer policy is argued, and created the Authority as the instrument by which the conclusions of that argument, once the government accepts them, can be executed. The councils are the Act’s memory of the movement that produced it; the Authority is its answer to the movement’s oldest complaint.

The gap Chapter VI filled: product injury before 2019

To measure the product liability chapter, it is necessary to be precise about what an injured consumer held before it existed, because the chapter’s novelty is easily overstated in one direction and understated in the other. The consumer was not remediless. Under the 1986 Act, goods with a defect, meaning a fault, imperfection or shortcoming in quality, quantity, potency, purity or standard required by law or contract or claimed by the trader, could ground a complaint, and the forum could order compensation for loss or injury suffered due to the negligence of the opposite party. In practice, claims for exploding pressure cookers, contaminated food, defective vehicles and injurious cosmetics were brought and sometimes won in that frame. Beside it stood the ordinary law of tort, in which a manufacturer owes the ultimate consumer a duty of care of the kind recognised since Donoghue v. Stevenson, enforceable in a civil suit on proof of duty, breach, causation and damage.

The gap was in the fit between the wrong and the frame. The defect complaint was designed around the transaction: it asked what was wrong with the goods against the standard they were sold by, and its characteristic reliefs were repair, replacement and refund, with compensation attached. A design defect fits that frame badly, because a product made exactly to its design breaches no specification and deviates from nothing its maker promised in the unit; the wrong is in the design itself, and the 1986 vocabulary had no ground that said so. A failure to warn fits it badly too, because the goods may be flawless and the instructions lethal, and the claim has to be re-described as a defect in the goods or a deficiency in an accompanying service. The tort route had the right concepts and the wrong economics: negligence had to be proved against a manufacturer who held the design records, the testing data and the engineering witnesses, in a forum with court fees, pleadings and appeals, for a claim whose value was usually a hospital bill. What Chapter VI changed was therefore not the existence of a remedy but its allocation of proof and its vocabulary. The claimant no longer has to translate a product injury into a transaction complaint or finance a negligence suit: the chapter names the grounds, assigns them to manufacturer, service provider and seller, relieves the claimant of proving negligence as a freestanding element, forecloses the no-negligence answer on an express warranty, and defines the recoverable harm so that personal injury and its attendant mental agony stand at the centre. Its conditions, and the Section 87 exceptions, keep it a conditioned liability rather than an absolute one, and in that respect the Indian chapter sits between the older negligence world it supplements and the stricter regimes, of which the European product liability directive is the standard example, that make the producer answer for a defective product without proof of a specific failing. The direction of travel, from fault toward ground-based liability, is the doctrinal story of the addition.

The guidelines: the Authority legislating in the open

The Authority’s guidelines power under Section 18(2) has produced the two instruments through which most businesses encounter the Authority, and they show the institution working in its regulatory rather than its prosecutorial mode. The Guidelines for Prevention of Misleading Advertisements and Endorsements for Misleading Advertisements, 2022 were notified on 9 June 2022. They state the conditions of a valid advertisement: an advertisement is valid if it is not misleading, does not contain deceptive patterns of the kind the guidelines describe, makes claims that can be substantiated, and does not omit material information or present disclaimers in a form calculated to be missed. They define and regulate the bait advertisement, which lures by an offer not intended to be provided in the form or quantity advertised, and the surrogate advertisement, which promotes a prohibited product in the dress of another. They prescribe the treatment of free claims, requiring that a claim of freeness not be made where a consumer must pay for anything beyond unavoidable delivery costs, and of disclaimers, requiring that a disclaimer not contradict or dilute the claim it qualifies. For endorsements, the guidelines give Section 21(5) its working content: an endorsement must reflect the genuine, reasonably current opinion of the endorser, must be based on adequate information about, or experience with, the goods or services endorsed, and must disclose any material connection between the endorser and the trader, manufacturer or advertiser that might affect the credibility of the endorsement and that the audience would not reasonably expect; and a professional who is barred by law from endorsing in a field, Indian or foreign, may not endorse in that field.

The Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023, notified on 30 November 2023, extended the same technique to interface design. A dark pattern is defined as a practice or deceptive design pattern using a user interface or user experience interaction on any platform, designed to mislead or trick a user into doing something the user did not originally intend, by subverting or impairing the user’s autonomy, decision-making or choice, and amounting to a misleading advertisement, an unfair trade practice or a violation of consumer rights. The guidelines prohibit any person, platform, advertiser or seller from engaging in a dark pattern, and their annexure specifies thirteen: false urgency, basket sneaking, confirm shaming, forced action, subscription trap, interface interference, bait and switch, drip pricing, disguised advertisement, nagging, trick question, software-as-a-service billing, and rogue malwares. The legal significance of the pair of instruments is the move from case to standard. Section 21 lets the Authority punish an advertisement; the guidelines let it say in advance, in general terms, what will count as the violation, which gives the compliant business a rule to conform to and the critic a text to argue with. That is the ordinary virtue of published subordinate legislation, and it is also the standing risk of it, since a guideline that travels beyond its parent section invites the same kind of challenge the appointment Rules attracted. The instruments are drafted to hang from Section 18 and the definitions of unfair trade practice and misleading advertisement in the Act, and their durability will be tested, if it is tested, on exactly that connection.

A replacement, not a code: what the Act left standing

A repeal and replacement of this kind invites the misunderstanding that the new Act is the whole of consumer law, and the Act itself corrects the misunderstanding in Section 100. The contract underneath the consumer transaction is still made and broken under the Indian Contract Act, 1872, and the property in goods, the passing of risk and the seller’s obligations on a sale still run through the Sale of Goods Act, 1930, whose implied conditions as to quality and fitness the consumer complaint frequently rides upon. The declarations on a packaged commodity, its net quantity, its maximum retail price and the identity of its manufacturer, packer or importer, are the province of the Legal Metrology Act, 2009 and its packaged commodities rules, and a misleading package may be an offence there, an unfair trade practice here, and a ground of complaint in a commission, all on the same facts. Advertisements for drugs claiming to cure the scheduled diseases and conditions are prohibited by the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act, 1954, a prohibition that stands beside the Authority’s general jurisdiction over misleading advertisements and that the Authority’s guidelines expressly work alongside. Food businesses answer to the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 for the safety and standards of what they sell, and to this Act for the fairness of how they sell it and for the injuries their products cause. The 2019 Act’s place in this company is that of the general statute: it supplies the rights, the regulator, the liability chapter and the forum, and it leaves the sectoral codes to supply the standards by reference to which defect, deficiency and danger are judged. A defect under the consumer statute is very often a breach of a standard set by another statute, and the replacement’s restraint in not attempting to codify the standards themselves is part of why the repeal could be confined to a single Act.

Kept, discarded, added: the verdict on the replacement

The replacement can be taken in the three moves the framework of this article has followed. What the 2019 Act kept was the working core of the 1986 settlement: the three-tier commissions and their appellate line, the definitions and the precedent built on them, the councils, the two-year limitation, and the summary, inexpensive character of the proceeding, with the penalties for disobedience to a commission’s order carried into Section 72, which punishes a failure to comply with an order of a District, State or National Commission with imprisonment of not less than one month and extending to three years, or a fine of not less than twenty-five thousand rupees and extending to one lakh rupees, or both. What it discarded was the design assumption underneath the old Act: that consumer protection begins and ends with a complainant. It discarded, with that assumption, the compensation-driven measure of jurisdiction, the exclusively physical model of filing and hearing, and the silence of the statute on the electronic marketplace. What it added is the four-part subject of this article: a regulator that can move on its own motion, a product liability chapter, a mediation stage inside the proceeding, and a power to annul unfair terms, together with the definition of consumer rights in Section 2(9) to which the new machinery is keyed, the enlarged definition of an unfair trade practice, and a graded code of offences for adulterated and spurious goods. The systematic comparison between the two statutes, provision by provision and forum by forum, is the business of the comparison of the Consumer Protection Act 1986 with the Consumer Protection Act 2019, and is not repeated here.

The series to which this article belongs has traced the same pattern in neighbouring fields: an adjudicatory statute comes first and addresses individual harm; the individual remedy proves unable to reach systemic practice; and a regulator is added a generation later to work on the practice rather than the case. It happened to competition law when the Commission replaced the MRTP framework, to real estate when RERA built a regulator beside the consumer forums, and it happened here when the Authority was set beside the commissions. The pattern is not an argument that the addition is always wise. A regulator duplicates some of what the forums do, competes for the same administrative resources, and holds coercive powers, recall, reimbursement, penalties and endorsement prohibitions, whose discipline depends on institutional capacity and appellate correction. But the pattern does identify what the 2019 Act actually changed, beneath the longer list of its sections. The consumer stopped being the only person who can start a case.

For the business and compliance reader, the operative additions are the Authority’s powers, the endorser’s exposure and its due diligence answer, and the duties the E-Commerce Rules lay on platforms and sellers. For the claimant, they are product liability and the unfair contract jurisdiction, with the territorial rule that lets the complaint begin where the complainant lives. For the aspirant and the researcher, the four additions are the examinable skeleton of the Act, and each is developed in its own terms in the sections above; a reader organising the material for teaching or revision can assemble the four additions into a single deck and open the deck in a browser-based PowerPoint viewer for presentation files without proprietary software. The honest verdict is that the replacement was an improvement in structure and an open question in capacity: the 1986 Act asked a defrauded buyer to be the entire enforcement system, and the 2019 Act no longer does, while the institutions charged with carrying the new design, a small authority policing a whole economy and commissions whose appointment rules the Supreme Court twice had to correct, will determine whether the design’s promise is the one the record eventually shows. The evidence that would settle the argument is identifiable in advance, and a reader returning to this statute should look for it in three places: in whether the Authority’s output shifts from guidelines and advertisement directions toward investigated recalls and class-wide discontinuation orders, which are the orders only it can make; in whether the State and National Commissions build a working jurisprudence on Sections 49(2) and 59(2), because a power to annul standard terms that is never exercised is a definition and not a remedy; and in whether product liability awards begin to appear on the design and warning grounds, which are the grounds that did not exist before 2019 and whose use is the cleanest measure of whether Chapter VI changed behaviour or merely vocabulary. On the text alone, the verdict of this article stands: the replacement was the most consequential redesign of Indian consumer law since the original statute, because it changed who may begin.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which new machinery did the Consumer Protection Act 2019 introduce?

The Act introduced four pieces of machinery that had no counterpart in the 1986 statute. The first is the Central Consumer Protection Authority, a regulator that may inquire and investigate on its own motion and order recalls, reimbursement and the discontinuation of unfair practices. The second is a product liability chapter, Sections 82 to 87, allocating liability for harm among manufacturers, service providers and sellers. The third is a mediation chapter, Sections 74 to 81, with mediation cells attached to the commissions. The fourth is a regime for electronic commerce, built through the definition of a consumer and the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, together with a statutory definition of an unfair contract whose terms the State and National Commissions may declare null and void.

Q: What is the Central Consumer Protection Authority?

The Central Consumer Protection Authority is the regulator established under Section 10 of the Act with effect from 24 July 2020, headed by a Chief Commissioner with other Commissioners appointed by the Central Government. Its mandate under Section 18 is to protect, promote and enforce the rights of consumers as a class, to prevent unfair trade practices, and to ensure that no false or misleading advertisement is made. It works through an Investigation Wing headed by a Director-General under Section 15 and through District Collectors under Section 16. After investigation it may order the recall of dangerous goods, the withdrawal of unsafe services, reimbursement of prices and the discontinuation of unfair practices under Section 20, and it may penalise misleading advertisements under Section 21.

Q: Who can be sued under product liability?

A product liability action under Section 83 may be brought against three categories of defendant. A product manufacturer is liable on the grounds in Section 84, including a manufacturing defect, a defective design, a deviation from specifications, non-conformity with an express warranty, and a failure to give adequate instructions or warnings. A product service provider is liable on the grounds in Section 85, where the service was faulty or deficient, where negligence or a conscious withholding of information caused harm, or where adequate instructions or warnings were not issued. A product seller who is not the manufacturer is liable only on the connecting factors in Section 86, such as exercising substantial control over the product’s design or labelling, altering the product, giving an independent warranty, or selling a product whose manufacturer cannot be identified or reached.

Q: How does the Act treat misleading advertisements and endorsers?

Section 21 empowers the Central Authority, after investigation, to direct that a false or misleading advertisement be discontinued or modified. It may impose a penalty on the manufacturer or the endorser extending to ten lakh rupees, and to fifty lakh rupees for a subsequent contravention, and it may prohibit an endorser from making any endorsement for up to one year, extending to three years for a subsequent contravention. A publisher may be penalised up to ten lakh rupees, subject to a defence for publication in the ordinary course of business. Section 21(5) protects an endorser who has exercised due diligence to verify the veracity of the claims endorsed. Behind the civil scheme, Section 89 makes the causing of a false or misleading advertisement by a manufacturer or service provider a criminal offence.

Q: What is an unfair contract and can a term be voided?

Section 2(46) defines an unfair contract as a contract between a manufacturer, trader or service provider and a consumer whose terms cause a significant change in the rights of the consumer. The definition names six cases: manifestly excessive security deposits, a penalty for breach wholly disproportionate to the loss, refusal to accept early repayment of a debt on payment of the applicable penalty, a right to terminate unilaterally without reasonable cause, assignment to the consumer’s detriment without consent, and any unreasonable charge, obligation or condition that disadvantages the consumer. A term can be voided: Section 49(2) empowers the State Commission and Section 59(2) the National Commission to declare a term of a contract that is unfair to a consumer to be null and void. The District Commission has no such power.

Q: How does mediation work under the 2019 Act?

Chapter V builds mediation into the proceeding before a commission. Under Section 37, at the first hearing of a complaint after admission, or at a later stage, if elements of a settlement appear to exist, the commission may direct the parties to give written consent within five days to a reference for mediation. The mediation is held in the consumer mediation cell attached to the commission under Section 74, before a mediator nominated from the commission’s panel, who must disclose any interest in the outcome under Section 77. If the parties settle, the agreement is written, signed and reported to the commission under Section 80, and the commission passes an order recording the settlement within seven days under Section 81. If mediation fails, the commission continues the hearing.

Q: Where can a consumer complaint now be filed?

Section 34(2) allows a complaint to be instituted in the District Commission within whose local limits the opposite party resides, carries on business, has a branch office or personally works for gain, or where the cause of action wholly or in part arises, and it adds a fourth basis that the 1986 Act did not contain: the place where the complainant resides or personally works for gain. A corresponding complainant-side basis applies before the State Commission under Section 47(4). Which tier hears the complaint depends on the value of the goods or services paid as consideration, and Section 35 permits a complaint to be filed electronically in the prescribed manner, so institution is no longer tied to the trader’s district or to physical presence at the commission.

Q: What penalties apply for selling adulterated or spurious goods to consumers?

Section 90 punishes manufacturing for sale, storing, selling, distributing or importing a product containing an adulterant on a scale graded by harm: up to six months’ imprisonment and a fine up to one lakh rupees where no injury results; up to one year and three lakh rupees for injury not amounting to grievous hurt; up to seven years and five lakh rupees for grievous hurt; and imprisonment of not less than seven years, extending to life, with a fine of not less than ten lakh rupees where death results. Section 91 applies the same structure to spurious goods, beginning at the injury tier. The offences of grievous hurt and death are cognizable and non-bailable, and the court may suspend the offender’s licence for up to two years on a first conviction and cancel it on a later one.

Q: When did the Consumer Protection Act 2019 come into force?

The Act received the assent of the President on 9 August 2019 but commenced in two stages the following year. By notification S.O. 2351(E) dated 15 July 2020, most of the Act commenced on 20 July 2020, including the definitions, the councils, the commissions chapter, mediation, product liability, Sections 90 and 91, and the repeal of the 1986 Act by Section 107. By notification S.O. 2421(E) dated 23 July 2020, the remaining provisions commenced on 24 July 2020, including the whole of Chapter III establishing the Central Consumer Protection Authority, Sections 88, 89, 92 and 93, and five deferred definition clauses, among them the definition of the Central Authority in Section 2(4). The repeal therefore took effect four days before the Authority existed in law.

Q: What happened to complaints pending under the 1986 Act when it was repealed?

They continued. Section 107(2) provides that anything done or any action taken under the repealed Act is deemed, so far as it is not inconsistent with the new Act, to have been done or taken under the corresponding provisions of the 2019 Act, and Section 107(3) preserves the general application of Section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897, which protects rights accrued and proceedings begun under a repealed enactment. Pending complaints therefore moved across to the reconstituted commissions rather than abating, and orders passed by the old forums remained executable as orders of the corresponding commissions. Questions of detail, such as the appellate deposit governing an appeal from a complaint instituted before commencement, fell to be decided on the savings text case by case.

Q: Why does pecuniary jurisdiction under the 2019 Act turn on the consideration paid?

Under the 1986 Act the tier of a complaint was fixed by the value of the goods or services together with the compensation claimed, so the forum could be influenced by inflating the compensation figure in the prayer. The 2019 Act substituted the value of the goods or services paid as consideration, a figure fixed by the transaction itself. As enacted, the bands were one crore rupees for the District Commission under Section 34, above one crore and up to ten crore rupees for the State Commission under Section 47, and above ten crore rupees for the National Commission under Section 58. The Consumer Protection (Jurisdiction) Rules, 2021 reset the operative bands to fifty lakh rupees, two crore rupees and above two crore rupees respectively. The Gujarat High Court upheld the consideration-based test in Rutu Mihir Panchal v. Union of India.

Q: Which rights does Section 2(9) of the 2019 Act give to consumers?

Section 2(9) defines consumer rights as a set of six. They are the right to be protected against the marketing of goods, products or services which are hazardous to life and property; the right to be informed about the quality, quantity, potency, purity, standard and price of goods, products or services, so as to protect the consumer against unfair trade practices; the right to be assured, wherever possible, access to a variety of goods, products or services at competitive prices; the right to be heard and to be assured that consumer interests will receive due consideration at appropriate fora; the right to seek redressal against unfair trade practice or restrictive trade practices or unscrupulous exploitation of consumers; and the right to consumer awareness. The Central Authority’s mandate and the commissions’ powers are keyed to this enumeration.

Q: When is a product seller not liable in a product liability action?

A product seller who is not the manufacturer is outside Section 86 unless a connecting factor is proved against the seller. The seller is therefore not liable merely for having sold the product. Liability requires that the seller exercised substantial control over the designing, testing, manufacturing, packaging or labelling of the product; altered or modified it, where the alteration was the substantial factor in causing the harm; made an independent express warranty that the product failed to meet; sold a product whose manufacturer is unknown or beyond the reach of process or enforcement in India; or failed to exercise reasonable care in assembling, inspecting or maintaining the product, or failed to pass on the manufacturer’s warnings and instructions. A passive retailer who did none of these things is not the insurer of the product’s safety.

Q: What exceptions does Section 87 provide to a product liability action?

Section 87 states the chapter’s exceptions. By Section 87(1), a product liability action cannot be brought against a product seller where, at the time of the harm, the product was misused, altered or modified. In an action based on a failure to provide adequate instructions or warnings, the manufacturer is protected where the product was bought by an employer for workplace use and the warnings were given to the employer; where the product is a component part and the necessary warnings were given to the purchaser of the component; where the product is legally meant to be used only by or under the supervision of an expert and reasonable means were employed to warn the expert; and where the complainant was under the influence of alcohol or of an unprescribed prescription drug. A manufacturer is also protected where the danger was obvious or commonly known.

Q: What duties do the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules 2020 place on a marketplace entity?

A marketplace entity carries the general duties of every e-commerce entity under Rule 4 of the 2020 Rules, including appointing a nodal person resident in India and a grievance officer who must acknowledge a complaint within forty-eight hours and redress it within one month, and displaying its legal name, addresses, website and grievance contact details. Rule 5 adds the marketplace-specific duties: to display the details of the sellers offering goods or services on the platform; to provide a ticket number against a consumer’s complaint so that its status can be tracked; to disclose the prescribed particulars of its arrangements with sellers; and to obtain a written undertaking from each seller that the descriptions, images and other content relating to the goods or services offered are accurate and correspond to what is supplied.

Q: Does the 2019 Act treat a person who buys goods online as a consumer?

Yes. Section 2(7) provides that a consumer is a person who buys goods or hires or avails of services for a consideration, and that buying and hiring include offline or online transactions through electronic means, teleshopping, direct selling and multi-level marketing. The online buyer is therefore a consumer on the same footing as the shop buyer, with the same access to the commissions and the same claim to the Section 2(9) rights. The established exclusions continue to apply: a person who obtains goods for resale or for a commercial purpose is not a consumer, subject to the exception for goods bought and used exclusively to earn a livelihood by self-employment, and a service rendered free of charge or under a contract of personal service falls outside the definition of service.

Q: What is the punishment for disobeying a direction of the Central Consumer Protection Authority?

Section 88 provides that a person who fails to comply with a direction of the Central Authority issued under Section 20, which covers recall, withdrawal, reimbursement and discontinuation orders, or under Section 21, which covers directions and penalties concerning false or misleading advertisements, is punishable with imprisonment for a term extending to six months, or with a fine extending to twenty lakh rupees, or with both. The provision is the enforcement spine of the Authority’s order-making power, converting its directions from requests into orders backed by criminal sanction. By Section 92, a court may take cognizance of an offence under Section 88 only on a complaint filed by the Central Authority or by an officer it authorises, and Section 93 permits such an offence to be compounded on the terms the Act prescribes.

Q: What did the Supreme Court decide about the rules for appointing members of consumer commissions?

In Ministry of Consumer Affairs v. Dr. Mahindra Bhaskar Limaye, decided on 3 March 2023, the Supreme Court upheld the Bombay High Court’s striking down of provisions of the Consumer Protection (Qualification for Appointment) Rules, 2020 that prescribed twenty years’ experience for State Commission members and fifteen years’ for District Commission members and dispensed with a written examination. Acting under Article 142, the Court directed that a bachelor’s degree with not less than ten years’ professional experience in fields such as consumer affairs, law, public affairs or administration be treated as the qualification until the Rules were amended, and that selection rest on two written papers and a viva voce. A later decision in 2025, Ganeshkumar Rajeshwarrao Selukar v. Mahendra Bhaskar Limaye, upheld the striking down of the selection committee and tenure rules and confined the written examination to non-judicial members.

Q: How does a matter reach the Central Authority instead of a consumer commission?

The two routes answer different questions. A consumer commission is reached by a complaint from a complainant seeking relief for a personal grievance, and it adjudicates. The Central Authority is reached without any individual grievance: under Section 19 it may act on information received, on a complaint made to it, on a direction of the Central Government, or of its own motion, by holding a preliminary inquiry into whether a prima facie case of violation of consumer rights, an unfair trade practice or a misleading advertisement exists, prejudicial to the public interest or to consumers as a class. On such a case being found, it directs an investigation by its Director-General or by a District Collector. The Authority may also refer a matter to a sectoral regulator, and under Section 23 it may itself file a complaint before a commission where adjudication is required.

Q: Can a consumer commission review its own order under the 2019 Act?

Yes. The 2019 Act confers express review powers that the 1986 Act had not conferred in terms. Section 40 empowers the District Commission to review an order passed by it where there is an error apparent on the face of the record, Section 50 confers the corresponding power on the State Commission, and Section 60 on the National Commission, in each case on an application made within the period the Act prescribes. The power is a corrective one, directed at errors apparent on the record rather than at a rehearing of the merits, and it sits alongside the appellate structure under which orders of the District Commission are appealed to the State Commission, orders of the State Commission to the National Commission, and orders of the National Commission, in its original jurisdiction, to the Supreme Court.