Shopkeepers can’t fabricate facts

Pushpa Girimaji

Recently, I bought what I believed to be a really good fabric to stitch frocks for my five-month old daughter. Because of the weather, I was very particular that the fabric should be pure cotton and the shopkeeper assured me repeatedly that it was so. However I soon realized that he had misled me because my daughter developed severe skin rashes and her pediatrician suspected it to have been caused by the clothes that I had stitched from the fabric. Now I do not want the shopkeeper to get away with this kind of practice and want to teach him a lesson. How do I go about it?

Just send the fabric to one of the textile testing laboratories. You will get to know the fibre content of the fabric . Confront the shopkeeper with the laboratory test results and ask him to apologize, refund the cost of the fabric, tailoring charges, the pediatrician’s fee and also pay for the medicines bought and the discomfort suffered by the child as well as the mental stress and agony suffered by you. If the shopkeeper is smart, he will compensate you. Or else, you can lodge a complaint with the consumer court, asking for compensation , besides exemplary damages for his refusal to redress your complaint. If you need help, contact a consumer organization in your city. In fact every consumer should be warned about such shop keepers.

How do I ensure that I do not get misled the next time I buy some fabric or ready-to wear garments?

In order to protect consumers from such unscrupulous retailers and also help them make an informed choice, several countries around the world have laws mandating label information on fabrics as well as ready-to wear clothes. Given the fact that in India the Consumer Protection Act gives every consumer the right to information and the right to informed choice, we should have also had such a law. But in its absence, all you can do is to buy from shopkeepers with a good track record for honesty and fair play.

You may be surprised to know that once upon a time, we did have a label regulation aimed at helping consumers make an informed choice. Called the Textile (Consumer Protection) Regulation, it was first notified in 1988 under Clause 17 of the Textile Control Order, 1986 and later, under the Textile (Development and Regulation) Order of 1993 and 2001. While the order provided for statutory labeling and its enforcement, the Regulation went into specifics.

As per the Regulation, manufacturers had to provide on the face plait of running cloth, sarees, dhotis and on the attached label on towels, bedcovers, etc, the exact fibre composition of the fabric, besides its characteristics such as colour fastness ; also the name and address of the manufacturer, month and year of packing, length and width of the fabric. In addition, the fabric had to indicate on every alternate meter close to the selvedge, the fibre content.

The Regulation prohibited incorrect, misleading, illegible or spurious markings. The office of the regional textile commissioners often tested the fabric to check the accuracy of the fibre composition claimed on the label and prosecuted violators under the Essential Commodities Act. The Regulation also gave consumers and consumer orgnaisations, the right to get the fabric tested . One could do so from any of the accredited textile laboratories for Rs 100.

Then in 2001, as the market dynamics changed, the government decided to gradually prune the list of goods defined as ‘essential commodities’ under the Essential Commodities Act . So in 2002, the union ministry of consumer affairs removed from the list, textiles made of silk, man-made cellulosic and non-cellulosic spun fibres and man-made cellulosic and non-cellulosic filament yarns .

Since the Textile (Development and Regulation) Order had been issued under Section 3 of the Essential Commodities Act, it automatically reduced the scope of the Consumer Protection Order to only textiles containing cotton and wool. Then the 2006 amendment to the Essential Commodities Act ( which came into effect from February 2007) removed cotton and woolen textiles too from the purview of the Act, thereby effectively nullifying the labeling regulation.

The ministry should have immediately brought in a new, more comprehensive regulation covering even ready made garments , to replace the old. But it never did. So consumers continue to remain vulnerable to the machinations of the market place.