SC restores power of consumer forums to enforce all orders, ends 18-year legal gap

The bench clarified that Section 25 of the 1986 Act must be read as empowering forums to enforce “any order” in a bid to bridge the gap.

In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court, on Friday, restored the authority of consumer forums to enforce all their orders, final as well as interim, treating them as civil court decrees. The decision closes an 18-year legal loophole that had left thousands of consumers with favourable verdicts but little real relief.

A bench of Justices JK Maheshwari and Rajesh Bindal, on Friday, held that the 2002 amendment to the Consumer Protection Act (CPA) had wrongly diluted forums’ powers by replacing the term “every order” with “interim order,” effectively barring them from executing their own final judgments, states a Hindustan Times report.

This error, the court stated, denied meaningful justice until Parliament corrected it in 2019.

The bench clarified that Section 25 of the 1986 Act must be read as empowering forums to enforce “any order” in a bid to bridge the gap.

“The consumers of justice should feel that they have received justice in reality and not merely on papers,” the judges observed, underlining that such orders must carry the same weight as civil court decrees under the Code of Civil Procedure.

The court also flagged a large backlog of execution cases and directed the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission (NCDRC) chairman to take steps for their expeditious disposal.

Senior advocate Jaideep Gupta was appointed amicus curiae to examine ways to strengthen the enforcement mechanism.