CHENNAI: This festive season, be an informed consumer and say no to products of substandard quality, especially while shopping at places offering heavy discounts, R Desikan, the founder-trustee of the Consumer Association of India said.“I was always piqued to see products being sold here as export quality. Though these products would be manufactured in India, the best of them were meant for buyers abroad. How does it make sense if the best of what is made in India is not available to an Indian,” he asked students of DG Vaishnav College here.He was participating in an interactive session with students of the Citizen Consumer Club of the college as part of the World Standards Day observed on Friday.He said, while shopping at places that offer discounts, buy a product only after ensuring that quality of the product is not compromised. Invariably, poor quality items, like shirts, are packaged in attractive offers and people buy it without realising that they have paid more than what it deserves, he said. “Ours is the only country to have standards set even for the quality of a ballpoint pen, but enforcement of these rules is abysmal,” he noted.Pointing at specific instances of manufacturers providing misleading information to consumers, G Santhanarajan, the director of CONCERT (Centre forConsumer Education, Research, Teaching, Training and Testing) advisedstudents to keenly examine products before purchase. Displaying a palmolein brand, which had pictures of groundnuts on its cover suggesting it contained groundnut oil, he said manufacturers should not be permitted to exploit consumer’s ignorance to provide such misleadinginformation.
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