Survey nails telecom, real estate lip ‘service’

Telecom has emerged as the worst industry in terms of quality of service, with over 21% of complaints received by the national consumer helpline in 2012 being related to this sector. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jun 30, 2013, 12:55:12 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Telecom has emerged as the worst industry in terms of quality of service, with over 21% of complaints received by the national consumer helpline in 2012 being related to this sector.

The ministry of consumer affairs has for the first time nailed the service offenders across 15 sectors.

While telecom was the worst in terms of number of complaints (around 25,000 out of a total of 121,000), real estate caused more monetary loss (Rs. 32.3 crore) — due to delays in handing over flats to owners or the quality of houses built — than any other sector.

This personal loss, known as consumer detriment, was calculated on the basis of a consumer’s evaluation of the expenses he had to incur due to poor service. In telecom, for instance, it may be the money lost on inflated bills or delayed activation.

The survey pegs the total loss caused by poor service across sectors last year at Rs. 250 crore though the sample size for calculating the loss was small.

The figure is based on the complaints received by the national helpline, which receives only a fraction of consumer complaints in the country.

Moreover, while the helpline received 1.21 lakh complaints last year, only around 20,000 were considered for calculating the monetary loss.

Real estate was followed by delivery of faulty products – such as air-conditioners, fridge and television sets – by retail stores. “Consumers had to take pains to get a replacement for a faulty appliance,” the study says.

Electronic commerce alone was responsible for losses to the tune of Rs. 12 crore. Banking and tourism were other offenders.

“The figure is a wake-up call for consumers as well as the government,” said Shri Ram Khanna, national coordinator of the helpline and former head of Delhi School of Economics.

“The so-called consumer policies are business-friendly, not people-friendly.”

For instance, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India gives a service provider’s appellate authority 90 days to redress a consumer’s complaint.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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