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The View from Inside India’s Consumer Fora: Empowering the Few

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2015

Robert MOOG
Robert MOOG*
Affiliation:
KoGuan Law School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
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Abstract

This article explores one aspect of India’s attempts to address its access to justice dilemma through the establishment of district-level consumer fora. Data points are extracted from 1,400 cases nationwide to piece together a portrait of the input and output of these institutions. The data collected include: win/loss rates; time from filing to decision; presence of attorneys (and their effects on win/loss rates and time from filing to decision); amounts of damages and costs awarded; and types of cases filed. In the end, this sampling of cases, combined with observations and interviews, led to several broad conclusions—that access to justice is increased but not for the marginalized or poor; that the consumer fora are severely underused; and that they are highly localized institutions leaving significant discretion in the hands of forum Presidents to drive the process which greatly varies the effects on access to justice among districts.

Keywords

access to justiceconsumer foraIndiaalternative dispute resolutionlegal empowerment
Type
Research Article
Information
Asian Journal of Law and Society , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , May 2015 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press and KoGuan Law School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University 

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Footnotes

*

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, School of Public and International Affairs, North Carolina State University. I want to thank everyone at the Law, Governance and Development Initiative at Azim Premji University for hosting me while in Bangalore and assisting with this project. Particular thanks are owed to Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Shishir Bail at Azim Premji for their kindness and invaluable help with my research. Thanks are also due to those in India associated with the consumer fora who were kind enough to permit me the time to interview them. I also want to thank the following graduate students at North Carolina State University who have given time to this work: Matthew Letterman, Shivanti Kaul, Kathryn Ferro, and Sandy Preiss. Lastly, I want to thank the School of Public and International Affairs at NCSU for providing funding for the research in India. Correspondence to: Dr Matthias Vanhullebusch, Assistant Professor, Managing Editor Asian Journal of Law and Society (CUP), KoGuan Law School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 1954 Huashan Rd, Shanghai, 200030, China. E-mail addresses: [email protected] and [email protected].

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