Those born after the turn of the millennium are largely unaware that India once possessed a vibrant, fierce consumer movement. In the 1960s and 1970s, a time that was defined by scarcity, black-marketing and a dysfunctional public distribution, nine women founded the Consumer Guidance Society of India. They built the first among many strong organisations set up across India. After five years, they led a delegation of five consumer organisations to Parliament demanding a comprehensive consumer protection law. That effort led to the Consumer Protection Act (COPRA) in 1986. From then until 2000, the Indian consumer movement had its golden period with several powerful organisations scoring decisive pro-customer victories.
Since then, however, the consumer movement has lost much of its relevance. Its strengths – providing information and guidance, testing daily-use products and issuing reports, class action and public interest litigation (PIL) -- have been replaced by internet reviews and the ‘virality’ of social media complaints and reels.
When choice became abundant and companies competed for your rupee, individual consumer sovereignty seemed to eliminate the need for organised activism. Fighting for orderly distribution of food, gas connections, or scooters became irrelevant when private companies were wooing people with a vast array of goods and services. This led to a gradual decline in activism since 2000, accompanied by a funding squeeze and increased dependence on government handouts, leading to a fall in membership and public engagement.
The proliferation of sectoral regulators suggested that consumer interest would be more closely guarded. In the early days, this seemed possible. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), the first independent regulator under chairman GV Ramakrishna, actively encouraged, accredited and engaged with investor groups across India. The telecom and power regulators followed this model. But gradually, the regulators decided that public stakeholders were an unnecessary irritant and began to shut them out from policy discussions.
Soon enough, India’s legal system delivered the worst blow by defeating COPRA’s promise of 90-150-day resolution. Consumer courts now operate with backlogs of nearly 100,000 cases and the tough pro-consumer decisions of the apex consumer court are often diluted by the Supreme Court of India (SC).
At the current speed of resolution and appeals, COPRA now seems designed to exhaust complainants into surrender – especially because exemplary penalties/damages are rare and do not cover time and cost of litigation. Companies were quick to figure out that long delays and poor outcomes meant that 90% of consumers abandoned their cases after a couple of years of adjournments. The battle was about attrition, not justice. Meanwhile, companies unleashed glitchy technology and artificial intelligence (AI) bots to handle customer service leading to a fresh trauma for consumers (AI in Customer Service: Frustration with Glitchy Automation and Data Capture).
A ray of hope appeared when social media emerged as an alternative, enabling quick embarrassment and resolutions, at least for viral posts. But often, companies respond to get complaints off the public domain which does not necessarily lead to resolution. The next big thing was online ratings – that the fear of bad reviews would ensure better treatment of consumers. The proliferation of fake and engineered reviews has often had the opposite effect.
Meanwhile, the core advocacy issues addressed by consumer organisations, such as adulteration, fraud, unsafe products and unfair practices, not only remained undiminished but evolved with time and technology. Every week exposes a new scandal. Tirupati temple laddus were found to be made with synthetic compounds and palm oil instead of ghee, paneer with zero milk, milk laced with detergents and toxic chemicals, harmful pesticides, carcinogenic food colouring – the list is endless. The convenience of online commerce is marred by dark patterns, fake products, poor access to redress and a scary proliferation of digital fraud.
Instead of a coordinated response from consumer organisations, what seems to work is individual action, public outrage and the occasional suo moto action.
COPRA 2019 was hailed as a game-changer for setting up the central consumer protection authority (CCPA). It has, indeed, taken up issues like restaurant service charges and misleading advertisements, but is often hamstrung because of the overlap with other sectoral regulators in food, power, telecom, etc.
AI to the Rescue?
In the coming days, AI promises to transform consumer protection in many ways. A couple of these initiatives are already showing results. For starters, India's upgraded national consumer helpline (NCH) now accepts complaints in 17 languages through voice input and is powered by AI speech recognition and natural language processing. This has not only broadened access but it is understood to have facilitated refunds worth Rs-45 crore by end of 2025.
A second initiative is NCH’s collaboration with Meta to deploy a chatbot called Grahak-Nyay, developed by IIT Bombay and the National Law School, Bengaluru, using specialised AI trained in Indian consumer law to guide consumers through complaint procedures, help draft legal notices and explain their rights. The pilot is reportedly promising. In January 2025, it launched e-Jagriti, a platform that integrates complaint filing, virtual hearings, multilingual accessibility and AI-powered chatbot support. It claims to have resolved 131 lakh cases until mid-November 2025.
Thirdly, use of AI in fraud detection, by uncovering anomalies in transaction patterns, is growing rapidly. It can potentially prevent fraud before it is complete, by triggering alerts, rather than after victims have lost money and filed a complaint. This will be a government initiative since AI systems must protect the entire network of financial transaction for such detection.
A fourth change is the clean-up of online reviews to improve trust and legitimacy. Trustpilot removed 4.5million fraudulent reviews in 2024 by analysing linguistic patterns, anomalies and verification status. Legitimacy of reviews will be a key decider in buying decisions of consumers. .
AI is also expected to track customer service quality through sentiment analysis and trigger alerts to the management when complaints spike for a specific issue, product or service allowing quick corrective action across the system. AI can track defunct testing, expiry dates, certifications, etc, to clean up the supply chain by flagging suspicious products.
The use of AI to detect dark patterns and anti-trust action, such as suppressing complaints or remedies, will only increase and can help regulators initiate enforcement action without the need for class action and advocacy.
All this can happen in a corruption-free environment where government prioritises the protection of people. On the flip side, poor governance and collusion can have the exact opposite effect by allowing corporations to weaponise systems using AI, faster processing and intelligent automation and hide their tracks to avoid detection and action.
What direction will India take? On the one hand, the consumer movement got its power from public support and the ability to challenge the government. While technology and Grahak-Nyay will help you draft faster complaints, clogged consumer courts and their refusal to award proper damages can defeat resolution.
Also, it is naïve to think that the government will protect consumers when it has ensured that the class action mechanism remains toothless, due to procedural and logistical hurdles of requiring 100 affected parties to form a class. Class action can only work if consumer organisations have the resources to put together the legal documents required and their role is recognised by the government and courts.
India's governance framework for AI, articulated in November 2025 guidelines, prioritises ‘innovation over restraint’ and relies on self-regulation. This is not the way forward for effective consumer protection. Without binding obligations and enforcement mechanisms, it is a recipe for regulatory capture, since companies are bound to build AI systems that serve their own interests and not public good. After innumerable posts and surveys exposed how rates for online services are gamed, CCPA issued corrective guidelines on this, but enforcement remains a problem.
In effect, AI and technology is unlikely to protect consumers – only three things can do it. First, judicial reform and a better understanding of punitive damages. Today, the legal process is a second round of punishment for victims, despite a plethora of sectoral regulators. Secondly, making class action work and, thirdly, recognising non-government organisations (NGOs) as legitimate plaintiffs would transform the redress process by forcing companies to settle issues instead of litigating.
Consumer protection in India stands at a crossroads. AI offers consumer organisations a chance to operate more effectively with smaller teams. But, unless people realise that government will not resolve their issues without organisations that watch and track its functioning, Indian consumers are doomed to remain victims of judicial delay, regulatory capture and misuse of technology.
Self regulation does not work in favour of customers as the manufacturers, traders, and dealers neither fear the law nor have a sense of being responsible to the society at large. Otherwise, what can explain the preponderance of counterfeit milk and milk products, medicines, cosmetics, liquor etc. FSSAI has not prescribed standards for several of these consumables. Malpractices abound in mis-selling of life insurance products by banks, and even in private hospital billings as exemplified by unnecessary procedures. Only tougher enforcement and deterrent punishment can have lasting effect. But the political will at the Central and State levels is missing, not to mention insufficient State capacity at different levels. While customer complaints lodged with large companies generally result in resolution, the need for consumer organisations for advocacy with the governments at various levels is ever present.
In my experience the consumer courts or commissions as they are called now, have degenerated into civil courts where a common man, even if educated, can not fight a case without the help of an advocate. After the introduction of E Jagriti ,it has become virtually impossible for a layman to represent himself without expert assistance both legally and technically. The court hall is full of lawyers and any one else is treated with contempt by the officials. Strict adherence to legal procedures as followed in civil courts is insisted upon. Thirty years back I could write my complaint
on a piece of white paper and the commission took prompt care of the whole procedure and resolve
it within a very short period and no civil court technicalities and legal jargon were made compulsory. Now, at least in the state of Kerala, commission officials are deputed from Civil Supplies department
and they can not clarify any doubts raised by the complainants and a lone person who may have
been deputed from a civil court behaves like an autocrat, forcing the consumer to run from pillar to post, as he is not familiar with civil court procedures.
I read this interesting article pointing out various aspects of consumer movement; how it started and now how it is at crossroads. We do have effective laws, but as mentioned in this article, proper impartial implementation is lost somewhere.
AI suddenly became viral like mushrooms. I have tested some of the tools and really found helpful. These tools are much better than a simple google search, because they provide specific answers. They do offer deep thinking. However, I want to say that sometimes it is necessary to cross verify the information. Afterall it is created by a human brain. And there is every possibility of garbage in garbage out.
The article mentions some ‘RESOLVED’ cases. I beg to differ on the usage of this word. Banks generally use this word while updating the status of our online complaint, which is just meaningless. I have never seen banks explaining what ‘SOLUTION’ was provided. The above term is used to simply say that the case is ‘CLOSED’. I asked co-pilot the difference between ‘SOLVED AND RESOLVED’. The explanation was wonderful. Try it out.
I think we need to analyze the data provided on the website of National Consumer Helpline. I had tried this sometime back and was not happy. One bitter truth is that AI is not going to stop us from falling for ‘GREED’ and ‘FEAR’. AI will help a consumer on drafting, etc.; but the same AI used by the opponent may tell how to reject the complaint.
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Fiercely independent and pro-consumer information on personal finance.
30-day online access to the magazine articles published during the subscription period.
Access is given for all articles published during the week (starting Monday) your subscription starts. For example, if you subscribe on Wednesday, you will have access to articles uploaded from Monday of that week.
This means access to other articles (outside the subscription period) are not included.
Articles outside the subscription period can be bought separately for a small price per article.
Fiercely independent and pro-consumer information on personal finance.
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on a piece of white paper and the commission took prompt care of the whole procedure and resolve
it within a very short period and no civil court technicalities and legal jargon were made compulsory. Now, at least in the state of Kerala, commission officials are deputed from Civil Supplies department
and they can not clarify any doubts raised by the complainants and a lone person who may have
been deputed from a civil court behaves like an autocrat, forcing the consumer to run from pillar to post, as he is not familiar with civil court procedures.
AI suddenly became viral like mushrooms. I have tested some of the tools and really found helpful. These tools are much better than a simple google search, because they provide specific answers. They do offer deep thinking. However, I want to say that sometimes it is necessary to cross verify the information. Afterall it is created by a human brain. And there is every possibility of garbage in garbage out.
The article mentions some ‘RESOLVED’ cases. I beg to differ on the usage of this word. Banks generally use this word while updating the status of our online complaint, which is just meaningless. I have never seen banks explaining what ‘SOLUTION’ was provided. The above term is used to simply say that the case is ‘CLOSED’. I asked co-pilot the difference between ‘SOLVED AND RESOLVED’. The explanation was wonderful. Try it out.
I think we need to analyze the data provided on the website of National Consumer Helpline. I had tried this sometime back and was not happy. One bitter truth is that AI is not going to stop us from falling for ‘GREED’ and ‘FEAR’. AI will help a consumer on drafting, etc.; but the same AI used by the opponent may tell how to reject the complaint.