Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
- Recently, a parliamentary panel on the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 has recommended that the government should amend the rules to provide better protection to consumers rights and stop unfair practices.
- Electronic commerce or e-commerce is a business model that lets firms and individuals buy and sell things over the Internet.
Important points:
- Predatory pricing as a short-term strategy, adopted by some of the market giants, may lead to wiping out competition from the market and could be detrimental to the consumers in the long run.
- It is the pricing of goods or services at such a low level that other firms cannot compete and are forced to leave the market.
- While e-commerce enterprises offer many benefits, the development of the segmentation has rendered consumers vulnerable to new forms of unfair trade practices, violation of privacy and issues of unattended grievances.
- There should be a more clear-cut definition of what constitutes Unfair Trade Practice and practical legal remedy to tackle such circumventing practices by e-commerce entities specifically Multinational Companies (MNCs) and Kirana Small Vendors.
- Clearly define ‘drip pricing’ wherein the final cost of the product goes up due to additional charges, and provide for protecting consumers against this by including penal provisions for violation.
Fixing Delivery Charges:
- The Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution should issue broad guidelines for the fixation of delivery charges charged by the e-commerce entities along with a cap on the highest limits of the delivery charges in peak hours of service.
- It should clearly distinguish in the Rules itself the cases of misinformation, no information and the information which is otherwise correct but creates a false impression and provides for penal provision for each case in the Rules itself.
- For protection of privacy of users and security of their data, the panel has recommended that users’ personal data may be categorised as per the level of sensitivity and appropriate protection may be assigned for each level.
- A secured and robust system of payment gateway should be made available to the consumers so that the transaction-related data of the users is not compromised in any way.
- All major e-marketplace entities should establish their data centre in India, so that consumer data are not hosted on a server outside the borders of the country, which may be misused by an enemy country.
- E-commerce entities should provide a dedicated customer care number as well as a mechanism to monitor the time taken by customer care executives to resolve an issue.
- There is a need to devise some regulatory mechanism to protect the local vendors/kirana, therefore, sufficient protection to such small/local vendors and ways in which such small retailers may also become part of e-commerce should be given by the Ministry.
- Some corrective mechanisms to discourage deceptive tactics including manipulation of algorithms, fake product reviews & ratings must be created so that the consumer interest is not harmed in any way.
SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES,MINT
