Who is a Consumer? — Definition under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019

Consumer protection law starts by defining precisely who counts as a consumer, because only a consumer, as defined, can use the protections and the redressal machinery this chapter describes. The current law is the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, which replaced the earlier Consumer Protection Act, 1986 with effect from 2020 — it is important not to confuse the two, since some of the redressal-machinery detail (covered later in this chapter) changed materially between them.

The 2019 Act's definition, in plain terms, a person is a "consumer" if he or she:

1. Buys goods for a consideration that has been paid, or promised, or partly paid and partly promised, or under any system of deferred payment — and includes any other person who uses those goods with the buyer's approval (for instance, a family member using a good the buyer paid for); or
2. Hires or avails any service for a consideration on the same payment terms — and includes any beneficiary of that service who uses it with the first person's approval.

What is deliberately excluded — the "commercial purpose" test. A person who obtains goods for resale or for any commercial purpose is not a consumer under the Act — the law protects end-users, not traders buying stock. There is one important carve-out to this exclusion: goods or services bought exclusively to earn a livelihood by means of self-employment still count as consumer use (for example, a tailor buying a single sewing machine to work with is still a consumer; a trader buying a hundred sewing machines to resell is not). …