Information pertaining to various courts in India is being digitized and put on the internet so that it can be retrieved by anyone sitting at home. The consumer court system is no exception. The judgments given by all the district consumer fora, state consumer commissions and the national consumer commission are required to be put on the website confonet.nic.in. The exercise is being done to help consumers, advocates and even consumer courts to find out whether issues interesting to them have come before any consumer court and what decision was given.
It is well-known that decisions of the state consumer commissions and the national consumer commission are binding on the subordinate consumer courts. Judgments of other district fora or other state commissions do not form a binding precedent, but they can be used as a persuasive precedent. Therefore, knowing previous judgments is extremely useful to consumers, lawyers and consumer courts.
It is well-known that decisions of the state consumer commissions and the national consumer commission are binding on the subordinate consumer courts. Judgments of other district fora or other state commissions do not form a binding precedent, but they can be used as a persuasive precedent. Therefore, knowing previous judgments is extremely useful to consumers, lawyers and consumer courts.
But there are numerous problems with the programme as it is being implemented now and the anticipated benefits are not being realized. Some problems are:
1. Many consumer courts are not taking this programme seriously and are not uploading their judgments promptly. This might be also due to lack of resources or trained personnel. Out of the 30 district consumer fora in the state, only 17 are up to date (Mysore district consumer forum is one of them). Even the Karnataka state consumer commission has not uploaded judgments for more than a year. Out of the 30 state commissions listed on the CONFONET website, only 20 are up to date.
2. There appears to be no policy on the format in which the judgments are available. Some are in plain text, some in text converted to pdf (portable data format) and some in scanned pdf. Some are in English and some in the local languages. This makes searching extremely difficult and defeats the very purpose of CONFONET. Also scanned pdf files are very large and waste space. Despite their large size, many scanned pdf files are not legible and so are useless.
3. Some of the judgments have critical typos such as wrong case number, omission of the names of the parties, name of the court, etc. Some have no beginning and no end. This raises questions about the credibility of the system.
To make CONFONET really useful, the National Consumer Commission must issue strict orders to the state commissions and the district fora to promptly upload their judgments typed accurately. To realize the foremost objective of CONFONET namely, to provide free-text search of the judgments at the national level, the judgments have to be in English text format.
It is interesting that the judgments available on confonet also reveal several violations of the Consumer Protection Act and Consumer Protection Regulations, 2005. For example, Sec. 3A of the Consumer Protection Act says that consumer courts must make every effort to decide a case within 90 days. Since the same section also says that no adjournment shall be ordinarily granted by consumer courts, it is clear that the intention of the law is that almost all cases must be decided within a period much less than 90 days.
But the data on the CONFONET reveal that the reality is quite opposite the intent of the law. A quick survey of the recent decisions reported on the website indicates that less than 10% of the cases are decided within the limit of 90 days and some cases have taken longer than 4 years. Also, Consumer Protection Regulations, 2005 mandate that consumer complaints must be given a number starting with CC and containing the serial number and the year (e.g. CC/2/2013). Similarly, a first appeal must be referred to as FA, revision petition as RP, execution application as EA, transfer application TA and review as RA. But many state commissions and district fora are not following this standardized nomenclature, making searches difficult.
But the data on the CONFONET reveal that the reality is quite opposite the intent of the law. A quick survey of the recent decisions reported on the website indicates that less than 10% of the cases are decided within the limit of 90 days and some cases have taken longer than 4 years. Also, Consumer Protection Regulations, 2005 mandate that consumer complaints must be given a number starting with CC and containing the serial number and the year (e.g. CC/2/2013). Similarly, a first appeal must be referred to as FA, revision petition as RP, execution application as EA, transfer application TA and review as RA. But many state commissions and district fora are not following this standardized nomenclature, making searches difficult.
MGP has written to the National Consumer Commission and the Karnataka State Consumer Commission about these problems with an appeal to rectify them.
Vishwas Krishna, MGP