This week’s faculty seminar will feature a presentation by Rahul Hemrajani and Varsha Aithala, Assistant Professors (Law) at NLSIU, on ‘Mapping the Landscape of Consumer Disputes in India: Evidence from a Household Survey, Helpline Records and Consumer Commission Data’.

Abstract

India was among the first countries to establish a specialist statutory system for consumer-dispute resolution. The Department of Consumer Affairs has further strengthened this framework through initiatives such as the Jaago Grahak Jaago campaign, the National Consumer Helpline, and the e-Daakhil portal, all designed to ease grievance redressal. Yet, research on the impact of these initiatives on consumer dispute resolution remains scarce. A central obstacle is the lack of data: little is known about the incidence of disputes, consumers’ legal needs, or their actual dispute-resolution practices in India.

In this paper, we map the landscape of consumer disputes in India by combining five bodies of evidence located at different tiers of the dispute pyramid: a household consumer needs survey fielded in Bengaluru, the National Consumer Helpline’s annual reports (2017–21), a hand-coded sample of 1,110 district commission cases disposed of in 2023, all 3,819 NCDRC orders issued between September 2023 and September 2024, and aggregate statistics on 3.17 million cases from the e-Jagriti platform. We find that the dispute pyramid in consumer law is steep. While 44% of households report consumer grievances, more than 40% are never fully resolved, under 10% go through resolution processes and less than 2% of grievances reach formal dispute resolution under consumer law. We also find variance in types of disputes that reach each part of the pyramid. Low-value e-commerce grievances dominate lived experience and helpline dockets, while insurance, real estate and banking, sectors that each have a dedicated regulator, form over 40% of all consumer litigation. Finally, we find that consumers who litigate win 71% of district court cases, but the median case takes 750 days against a statutory norm of 90. We conclude that India’s consumer protection regime, now entering its fifth decade, serves primarily a narrow class of high-value disputes while remaining largely inaccessible to the ordinary consumer.