Addressing the Lok Sabha session on March 26, Pralhad Joshi, Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food, and Public Distribution of India, shared that the Ministry has logged over 7,986 e-commerce grievances from Punjab in 2024.
The Minister was responding to the queries raised by Charanjit Singh Channi, ex-CM of Punjab, over the government’s efforts to tackle fraud and misleading business practices by online e-commerce companies in the state.
In his response, Joshi shared that over 23,838 e-commerce grievances have been registered from Punjab since 2022. In 2023, the Ministry received around 8448 grievances from the state and in 2022, the number stood at 7404.
“Department of Consumer Affairs (DoCA) is continuously working for consumer protection and empowerment of consumers by enactment of progressive legislations,” the Minister said.
The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 provides for a three tier quasi-judicial machinery at District, State and Central levels, commonly known as “Consumer Commissions” for protection of the rights of consumers and to provide simple and speedy redressal of consumer disputes. Further, the National Consumer Helpline (NCH) administered by the DoCA has emerged as a single point of access to consumers across the country for their grievance redressal at a prelitigation stage. Consumers can register their grievances from all over the country in 17 languages including Hindi, English, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Nepali, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Maithili, Santhali, Bengali, Odia, Assamese and Manipuri.
CCPA has notified the Guidelines for Prevention of Misleading Advertisements and Endorsements for Misleading Advertisements, 2022 on June 9, 2022. Further to strengthen consumer protection, the CCPA enacted the Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Greenwashing and Misleading Environmental Claims, 2024 (effective October 15, 2024).
While ‘Police’ and ‘Public Order’ are State subjects as per the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution of India, the Minister shared that the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has established Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) as an attached office to provide a framework and eco-system for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to deal with cybercrimes in a comprehensive and coordinated manner.