ITC To Compensate 1Lakh To Customer, Consumer Court Verdict Says (Image: itcstore.in)

ITC, a diversified conglomerate with businesses spanning Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Hotels, Paperboards and Packaging, Agri Business and Information Technology, to compensate a customer after a consumer court has found the company guilty of unfair trade practices. The court has asked ITC to compensate the customer Rs 1 lakh.

Dillibabu, from Chennai, petitioned to the consumer court that the ITC company was cheating consumers to an amount, near to Rs. 30 lakh per day, reported the HT.

The incident occurred in December 2021. Dillibabu had bought two dozen of Sunfeast Marie Light from Manali. When he opened the packet of biscuits, he found that the pack was short of one biscuit. The biscuit pack had said that it contains 16 in numbers. For an explanation on this, he went to the store and also to ITC but received none.

In his complaint, he said that the cost of each biscuit would come up to 75 paise and that the company, ITC produced close to 50 lakh packets a day. Calculations on this, suggested that the company was cheating customers of Rs 29 lakhs every day.

Responding at the court, the ITC said that, the said product was only sold on the basis of its weight and not on the number of biscuits in the pack. The net weight of the product which was shown on the cover was 76 gms, it said.

On examining this, the commission found only 74gms. The ITC’s counsel responded that as per the Legal Metrology Rules, 2011, an error of 4.5 gram is permitted in the case of pre-packaged commodities.  The Judge was not in agreement with this, saying that this clause was only applicable for items which were ‘volatile’ in nature.

The verdict, which came on August 29, held ITC guilty of unfair trade practices, told ITC to discontinue that certain batch of product and also to pay the customer a compensation of Rs.1 lakh.