Consumer Rights in Transition: Digital Transformation, Emerging Challenges, and India's Evolving Consumer Empowerment Framework (1986–2026 and Beyond) — A Human Rights Perspective

Vollständiger Abstract

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India's consumer protection law has come a long way since 1986. What began as a compensation-driven, forum-based system for settling individual grievances has, over the last four decades, turned into something closer to a preventive and technology-aware regime built around the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. That shift matters more than ever now. Online platforms, algorithmic pricing, personalised advertising and data-driven selling have changed what a transaction even looks like, and they have brought harms dark patterns, covert data use, one-sided information that the drafters of the 1986 Act simply could not have imagined. This paper looks at that forty-year arc through a doctrinal and socio-legal lens, reading it against the human-rights vocabulary set out in the United Nations Guidelines for Consumer Protection (1985, revised 2015) and against Article 21 of the Constitution of India. Drawing on statutes, delegated rules, regulatory guidelines and secondary literature, the paper reconstructs how the idea of a consumer right emerged and evolved, points to gaps in how e-commerce, dark patterns and targeted advertising are currently governed, and sketches a layered framework connecting consumer protection to dignity, autonomy and control over one's own information. The picture that emerges is mixed: the Central Consumer Protection Authority, the E-Commerce Rules of 2020 and the 2023 Dark Patterns Guidelines are genuine institutional gains, yet enforcement capacity, cross-border reach and basic digital literacy among consumers remain weak points. The paper's broader claim is that India's consumer-law trajectory should not be read as a string of isolated amendments but as an ongoing constitutional project — one that will increasingly have to reckon with data governance and artificial intelligence as it moves toward 2026 and beyond. Key Words: Consumer Protection Act 2019, digital rights, human rights, dark patterns, e-commerce regulation, Central Consumer Protection Authority, consumer empowerment