Supply and demand play a crucial role in the market system, ensuring an adequate volume of quality products and a steady supply to meet consumer needs. Consumers have the right to choose products freely, without pressure or coercion. This principle aligns with the well-known saying, “The customer is always right.”
The theme for World Consumer Rights Day 2025 is “A Just Transition to a Sustainable Lifestyle”. Together, we will call for greater consumer protection and empowerment to drive the urgent changes needed to achieve global sustainability goals. World Consumer Rights Day is a globally recognized event supported by the United Nations and other international organizations. For over 40 years, Consumers International has led this campaign, bringing together consumer movements and partners worldwide. Each year, Consumers International members help select the campaign theme to mobilize global action on pressing consumer issues.
Observed annually on 15 March, World Consumer Rights Day serves as a platform to raise awareness about consumer rights and needs. It is an opportunity to demand respect and protection for consumers and to stand against market abuses and social injustices that undermine these rights.
The past decade has been the warmest on record, with extreme weather events becoming more frequent, disrupting lives and livelihoods. Furthermore, biodiversity loss and pollution pose increasing threats to both planetary and human health. These crises have far-reaching economic and social consequences, undermining progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Under government guidance, service personnel from the Department of Consumer Affairs, under the Ministry of Commerce, work to resolve consumer disputes in domestic markets. Consumers frequently face challenges such as low-quality and counterfeit products, high prices, sales of prohibited goods, unethical business practices, and inaccurate product measurements. The Department of Consumer Affairs addresses these issues fairly and takes appropriate action against offenders.
A sustainable lifestyle depends on consumers having reliable and convenient access to quality goods and services. If markets based on impropriate trading of goods between marketers and consumers fail to ensure this, they risk collapse, triggering broader financial crises worldwide — much like a domino effect. Such a spark will cause a collapse of the markets and deteriorate a large number of lives. Therefore, all citizens have a role in maintaining a stable and fair consumer environment by joining hands with departmental officials and local authorities to solve problems between marketers and consumers in time to regularly run the market system.
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