Grahak Suvidha Kendra, Ahmedabad 2.73

Grahak Suvidha Kendra

A new initiative of the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, the Government of India is the Grahak Suvidha Kendra as a ONE STOP CENTER catering to a spectrum of services for consumer welfare. It will function as an extended arm of State Helpline and will function on a Common IT platform of National and State consumer Helplines. It will have local language, English & Hindi service. It will have trained personnel, experienced in counselling, drafting complaints, providing information, and also appearing on behalf of consumers in consumer courts.

Recognising the importance of digital governance and to provide a simple, efficient and integrated solution that will link these various platforms is underway. The Department of Consumer Affairs is now working on integrated electronic platform that will provide a nation-wide consumer grievance network. This will be part of a network of Grahak Suvidha Kendras to serve as integrated consumer advocacy centres that will extend a host of services – information dissemination, counselling, grievance redress, mediation, class action, product testing, capacity building and training and mobilising popular support to the consumer movement. To begin with eight such centres are proposed. These are expected to be operational by the beginning of the next financial year. The Grahak Suvidha Kendras will be run and managed by Voluntary Consumer Organisations.

Grahak Suvidha Kendras would be given an interface to access GAMA for lodging the grievances of consumers. Any citizen can go to any of these centres to lodge his /her grievances against Misleading Advertisements.

Consumer Education and Research Centre believes that there is need to educate consumers to be alert of the quality of the products, and possible deficiencies in the services from the growing sector. The overall goal of these consumer awareness activities is to create and sustain awareness amongst different categories of consumers of communication services with a view of enabling them make informed decisions.

Essential issues consumers are educated on include:

a) Consumer rights and obligations
b) Redress seeking methods
c) Consumer intelligence and vigilance
d) Consumer assertiveness.
e) Communications sector trends

for more details click the link...
http://www.cercindia.org/