Consumers Attitude towards Consumer Protection Act, with reference to India.

Abstract

World consumer rights day was declared on march 15th of every year. US president John F
Kennedy who addressed, on this day, about the need for protecting consumer rights and,
consequently the first consumer movement was recorded in 1983.
In 1986, core laws were introduced by the government of India through Consumer protection
Act (CoPRA) and then amended it in the year 2002. According to the statement displayed in
website http://cuts-cart.org , even after 25 years from the date of implementation of the
CoPRA, still, only 20 percentage of consumers in India aware about it. This paved the
researcher a way to conduct further study on the attitude of the consumers towards their
consumer rights against unethical business practices. Comprehensive literature study was
observed in connection with the study and significant period of gap was found, especially
with respect to the attitude of educated consumers. Thus, the researcher decided to conduct
exploratory study on the selected sample of Graduate and Non–Graduate respondents.
Research questionnaire was circulated to randomly selected 1578 respondents residing in the
metropolitan cities of India. But 324 questionnaire were returned blank. The collected
primary data from 1254 respondents were analysed with the help of using online statistical
tools to derive the conclusion. The result of the study depicted that the attitude of consumer
was dependent variable on independent variables of consumers‟ level of knowledge on
consumer protection act and interest to claim through consumer court for their justification.
Other depended variables were connected with factors that are influencing consumers
attitude towards approaching consumer court for legal remedy are such as lack of training ,
cumbersome court procedure, cost of advocacy, coercion.