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Abstract

The Consumer Protection Act, 1986 seeks to provide an assurance that consumer interests will receive due consideration at appropriate forums. However, over the past several years, Indian courts have shown a peculiar reluctance to recognizing educational institutes as service providers under the said Act. There is a visible trend of consumer forums’ declining jurisdiction to entertain complaints concerning the provision of educational services. The said reluctance, which initially arose in the context of Education Boards and public institutions, is now being extended to private institutions as well, with the thriving industry of engineering/ medical private coaching centres being the biggest beneficiaries. By means of the present paper, I intend to address the aforementioned trend with reference to the provisions contained in the said Act, the object it seeks to achieve, and the march of case law in this regard. On a conjoined understanding of these three aspects, I will put forth the argument that there does not exist any justifiable basis to exclude the commercial services offered by private coaching centres from the jurisdiction exercised by the hierarchy of consumer forums in terms of the Consumer Protection Act, 1986. Per contra, there is a dire need to remedy the flawed judicial understanding of the extent to which certain educational services may fall within the purview of the Act. After all, the supposed education as offered by private coaching centres for large sums of money is indeed a “commodity,” the deficiencies of which must be determined before the appropriate consumer forums.

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