New Champions of Consumer Rights

With great pleasure I take this opportunity to announce the new champions of consumer rights. 🙂

Pepsi Bottling Plant Fined

Ankit Jain, a lawyer who takes on Pepsi. Ankit had ordered two crates of Pepsi, when he noticed that some of the bottles were only partly filled. That is when he filed a complaint with the consumer court, the Pepsi bottling amount at Noida has been fined. The point as made by Ankit’s petition is: “With the kind of shortage being there in one bottle, the bottling plants must be causing total shortage of lakh litres each day. Considering that the plant fills 10,000 bottles per minute and runs for almost 8-10 hour per day, they must be making lakhs of rupees per day as unlawful gains and causing a corresponding unlawful loss to the consumer.” You can read the interesting accounts of Ankit’s exploits here. It is notable that this lawyer has taken Nirulas (the restaurant chain at Delhi) and State Bank of India to consumer court. May we have more lawyers like him.

ICICI bank fined for Rs. 85,0000-

The second hero of the week is Lt. Col Rajesh Yadav who had a savings account with Delhi branch of ICICI bank. He was erroneously billed by the bank for an amount of Rs 45,623 on a “renewed card” that was never issued to him!! Sounds familiar? Well, consumer panel fined ICICI bank for an amount of Rs. 85, 000/- on grounds of mental agony. Did I hear you muttering, “Serves them right!” 😀

It is true Pepsi and ICICI may not become exemplary companies overnight due to these paltry fines levied on them by consumer court. But I am sure they would think twice and reconsider when faced with another Ankit Jain and Lt. Col. Rajesh Yadav.

P.S: I was really sad when no one responded to my questions in my post Consumer Awareness II. But these two pieces of news cheered me up. It means the voice of consumer is not dead. There is still some hope. Amen! 🙂