Consumer Affairs Secretary Nidhi Khare flags a fivefold rise in complaints over five years, calls for AI and robotics to scale up product testing
India’s Consumer Affairs Secretary Nidhi Khare on Tuesday called on FMCG, food and retail companies to overhaul how they handle customer complaints, warning that grievances have surged in recent years even as she pushed for wider use of artificial intelligence and robotics to expand product-quality testing.
Speaking at a conference organized by FICCI, Khare said complaint volumes have climbed sharply as consumers become more assertive about product and service quality.
Complaints up fivefold in five years
According to Khare, the government’s consumer affairs department currently oversees both quality and quantity assurances for consumers — quality through the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) and its network of testing laboratories, and enforcement through channels such as the National Consumer Helpline and the e-Jagriti online portal for unresolved cases.
She noted that complaint numbers are now roughly five times higher than they were five years ago, a trend she linked to rising consumer awareness rather than declining product quality alone. Citing an example involving a luxury car buyer’s frustration with an automaker’s grievance process, Khare said dissatisfaction with redressal systems spans both budget and premium consumer segments alike, and that companies need stronger mechanisms to resolve such issues.
AI and robotics to scale testing capacity
A central theme of Khare’s remarks was the push to modernize testing infrastructure using AI and robotics, which she said could dramatically expand the volume of product samples that can be tested — potentially increasing daily testing capacity tenfold, from around 30 samples a day to roughly 300 — while reducing human contact, cutting costs for small and medium manufacturers, and improving accuracy and traceability.
She also pointed to the National Test House as a body expanding testing capabilities into newer sectors, including aerospace, drones, organic food, electric-vehicle batteries, switches and solar panels.
Simplifying standards and easing compliance
Khare said the government is working to simplify BIS standards to make them easier for industry to follow, with the goal of completing that work by World Standards Day on October 14. She noted that BIS has established roughly 24,000 standards in total, though only a fraction are mandatory, and that many other countries rely more heavily on voluntary conformity — an approach Indian businesses could also adopt for non-mandatory BIS standards.
On the regulatory side, she said the number of Quality Control Orders (QCOs) governing products has been trimmed from around 700 to 624 as part of broader efforts to ease business compliance.
Decriminalization and a grace period for mistakes
Khare also highlighted the government’s move to decriminalize several regulatory provisions, saying the intent is to build trust with manufacturers and retailers rather than treat minor, unintentional errors as criminal offenses. As part of this shift, the department has introduced an “improvement notice” mechanism under the Legal Metrology Act, giving manufacturers and retailers a window to correct mistakes before a case proceeds toward compounding.