Q.Who is a 'consumer' under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019?

The definition turns on two things: whether consideration was paid, and whether the purchase was for personal use rather than resale.

Under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, a consumer is any person who buys goods, or hires or avails of any service, for a consideration that has been paid, promised, part-paid and part-promised, or paid under a system of deferred payment. The definition also extends to any user of such goods (with the buyer's approval) or any beneficiary of such a service, even if that user or beneficiary is not the person who actually paid for it — provided, in every case, that the goods or service are meant for personal use and not for resale or for use in any commercial activity.

This personal-use condition matters: a trader who buys stock specifically to resell it, or a business that buys raw material to manufacture goods for sale, is not a 'consumer' in this protective sense, since such a buyer is presumed to already have commercial bargaining strength and falls outside the scope of this particular remedy.

A feature specific to the 2019 Act (absent from the 1986 Act) is that this definition expressly covers transactions carried out through electronic means — purchases made on an online marketplace, through teleshopping, direct selling, or multi-level marketing are all treated as covered, removing any doubt that might otherwise have existed about whether an online buyer counts as a 'consumer' under the law.

A common omission is leaving out the 'personal use, not resale/commercial purpose' condition, and a second common gap is forgetting to mention that the 2019 Act expressly covers online/e-commerce purchases, which was a genuinely new clarification over the 1986 Act.