Helen McCallum's India Diary: Call for collective action, Part Three

CI Director General Helen McCallum travelled throughout India recently meeting with many CI members to discuss how a vast country with a disparate population can most effectively promote consumer rights. In Part 3 of her blog, she looks at possible solutions.

As I travelled round and talked to members I found myself wondering what they were expecting of CI and whether we could meet those expectations, given that, as a central body, we too need additional funding over and above the member fees to survive and support a growing movement.

Over the last year we have been following a strategy of:

• Focusing on a small number of issues which matter to all consumers. Issues for which there is  something to be achieved at the international level, most members have active work programmes and can pool and share ideas, and there is potential – subject to successful fundraising - to pursue more specific  regional issues within the overall programme.
• Developing services which can bring members together – either in their own backyard or across the globe – to share information and resources, to learn from the experience of others and perhaps in due course to offer or receive mentoring services from those who have more years experience or have developed an idea which is now transferable somewhere else.
• Finding additional sources of funding – both to sustain CI itself (so we don’t have to put the fees up) and to support specific targeted activity within our four priority areas in different parts of the world.

 It was with some relief that I discovered during my trip to India that members want CI to have already developed this strategy and be in a position to offer more tangible support to them.

They were all supportive of the direction. The strategy is sound – it is all now about rapid execution of it.

Why are we at this stage? 

Well as evidenced in India among some of the organisations I met, many organisations change in nature over a period of 50 years and there are always moments when an organisation has to stop, refresh itself and sometimes even re-invent activity which has become tired or fallen out of use because of changing personnel or different priorities.

CI too has had its ups and downs – with some large funders refocusing their activity away from consumer issues.

The international donor landscape has become much more competitive and the needs of  the consumer movement changing as more countries wake up to the risks of leaving consumers unprotected in an increasingly global market.

One year in and our priority programmes are attracting attention from international policy makers and increasingly grant making bodies and others donors.

We have had some successes in persuading the G20 to take action on consumer protection in financial services; getting more consumer representation on international forums on digital issues; achieving agreement on sustainable consumption goals at Rio+20 and completing our funded programme to introduce Consumer Protection Laws in three countries in the Caribbean.

Our members are actively participating in the  expert groups and more and more of you are joining our e-mail networks, receiving intelligence about the key issues and discussing the issues online.

From what I heard in Delhi, there is real enthusiasm and commitment to arguing for revisions to the UN Guidelines on Consumer Protection and there has been an explosion of activity around the world on World Consumer Rights Day. Our first international study, The State of Consumer Protection, should give many members ammunition for national lobbying and many governments food for thought.

Our online asset library, or Resource Zone as it will be known, is now live. This first stage is about recreating the physical resource libraries which once existed at regional office level and making the material we already have as accessible as possible.

This is just the first step – we have ambitions – if we can find the funds – to develop a more interactive online facility which will eventually enable members to debate in online forums, search for items they need and perhaps even directly input material that they think would be helpful to other members.

In the meantime however, we would urge members to think about training material policy documents or other useful resources they have and let Luke Upchurch in CI’s London office know about them so that we can mention them in the first stage of the Resource Zone.

In addition, we are refreshing our fundraising strategy, aiming to be clearer about our case for support and making sure we reflect regional variations in our pitch for funding.

We have set up webinars on various topics – impossible to time so that members everywhere can join in in real time – but sent out subsequently so everyone can catch up with the discussion in their own time.

What I can say is that the CI staff supported by your elected Council are 100% committed to the strategy and to driving new plans forward with energy and speed.

Although my time as DG will come to an end in December, the way forward is established and the search is on for a successor who can keep up the momentum and add new and innovative thinking to CI to help realise the aim of supporting you and developing a powerful consumer movement equal to the challenges of the 21st Century.

Helen McCallum's India Diary: Call for collective action, Part Two

CI Director General Helen McCallum travelled throughout India recently meeting with many CI members to discuss how a vast country with a disparate population can most effectively promote consumer rights. In Part 2 of her blog, she looks at possible solutions.

 

Despite much animated discussion and useful debate over Indian tea and spicy food during my trip, there is no single emerging solution to the problems of the consumer rights movement in India.

However, part of the answer may be to build on the strength of each consumer organisation (CO), pooling resources where it makes sense to do so and, unless it is critical to meet a specific local need, avoid duplicating expensive outlays.


Many of the European COs have concluded that collective purchasing of comparative testing laboratories is more cost effective than each organisation attempting to go it alone. They would, therefore, urge Indian COs to start active discussions about sharing facilities and undertaking joint action.

With all those I met I posed the question, “How much do you work with other COs?” The answers I heard varied from examples of active local cooperation to occasional participation in each other’s seminars to the reply “ego is the stumbling block!”.

So how can Indian COs work together?

• By pooling publishing resources, sharing relevant content and translating it into different languages, pooling design or printing services to get better deals;
• By sharing testing resources, ie, using the labs that exist already in India rather than creating new ones;
• By creating a national network of experts who can add much needed research and policy weight to advocacy campaigns and even joining forces to run a nationwide campaign where this makes sense; and
• By extending the cooperative purchasing model to cover more of India and consider joint purchasing of services as well as food and household goods.

All this could result in a ground breaking network of powerful consumer bodies better equipped to build consumer power and activism at the grass roots level and more powerful and impossible to ignore at the national level, with government and corporations alike.

Such a powerful network would also look much more attractive to international funding bodies – which not unreasonably want to see their funds make a real national impact – and who are reluctant to fund organisations which appear to be duplicating the work of others.

This view was supported by the representative of GIZ India who I talked to over breakfast one day – and is perhaps the impetus behind the government funded apex body CCC.

CI has already begun to explore this type of cooperative coming together in Africa – another large continent with many underfinanced and relatively small COs spread across a vast geographical area with significant consumer need and various cultural and linguistic differences.

The initiative is in the early stages but the concept is that larger and stronger CI members in different parts of Africa will act as the “hub” around which smaller groups gather – coming together to join forces on CI campaigns, training sessions and learning from each other.

The existence of these hubs – likely to be four or five in number – enables the CI staff (only three in Africa at the moment) to physically meet up with all members – visiting them all singly would just be impossible – and helps us to direct support and help in a targeted way.

If this works – and we should give it time to develop – it might also be a model which could be applied to India and perhaps other parts of the world.

CI's Resource Zone is another example of collective working - we want it to be a hub for research and capacity building materials that will empower member organisations worldwide.  

Helen McCallum's India Diary: Call for collective action

CI Director General Helen McCallum travelled throughout India recently, meeting with many CI members, to discuss how a vast country with a disparate population can most effectively promote consumer rights. In Part 1 of her blog, she examines the existing situation.

Even before arriving in India, the advice one regularly hears, “don’t drink the water”, points to one of the key consumer issues in this vast and vibrant country.

The trip from the airport in Chennai certainly confirmed that for many people access to basic services is still where the main problems lie.

But the other half of India, witnessed in the Bandra district of Mumbai, reveals problems more often associated with well-to-do consumers: misselling of financial services; access to cost-effective energy services; junk food advertising; and the miss-use of private data gathered through the Internet.

The consumer movement in India certainly faces an extremely difficult challenge: to support the needs of a widely diverse population. Luckily, on my travels I also found some energetic and committed people and organisations ready and willing to tackle this challenge.

On arrival in Chennai, someone told me that there are more than 1,000 consumer organisations (COs) in India. How many of those are active and viable no one seems to know.

Those that I met, including active CI members from Tamil Nadu in the South to Mumbai in the west to Delhi in the North, as well as the many organisations represented at CI’s annual Asia Pacific and Middle East regional meeting were all effective in their various ways.

What I found was enormous diversity in terms of organisational strengths and activities – all united by a vision of the empowered consumer.

For example, CI member MGP in Mumbai runs a food cooperative supplying more than 95 essential household items to more than 32,000 families in West India.

They deal in locally-produced goods which are high in quality and short on packaging, making a significant contribution both to community cohesion in a large urban environment and to sustainable consumption.

MGP’s work empowers a large numbers of consumers in a really practical way. Families who are part of their network remain members for life, many of them offering their services as volunteers to support the additional work on consumer education and advocacy campaigns which are an essential part of MGP’s activity.

MGP enjoys good media support for their campaigns and have had a number of high profile successes but they still need to be able to access more expertise to back up their lobbying and enable them to do even more.

The strength of other COs such as CI members CAI  and CAG in Chennai, and CUTS and Voice in the North lies in consumer advocacy, education, awareness and mediation.

CAI has just extended their helpline service which enables consumers to call them and leave a message to register a concern or complaint and receive a call back to support them in resolving it.

Consumer courts in India are notorious for taking a long time to reach a resolution – with the consumer often left in limbo for years waiting for redress.

This is the reason for the emphasis on mediation which I found throughout India and which also appeals to the Indian culture, resulting as it does in a win/win result rather than a win/lose result which is inevitably the outcome of court action.

Consumer clubs in schools and universities were another feature of my visit – Indian consumer groups believe in catching them young – and with good reason.

Such clubs frequently act as the breeding grounds for the next generation of consumer activists as well as helping young people avoid potential pitfalls, creating savvy consumers for the future and using their influence within the family to alert their parents and relatives.

This clearly gives the many volunteers associated with COs in India a real sense of progress and satisfaction.

I met only one group who have established laboratory facilities for testing consumer products and that was CERC based in Ahmedabad. Although I wasn’t able to visit the labs, I met with the CEO and one of the trustees and had an in-depth briefing on the capability and range of testing they were able to do.

Other organisations were keen to carry comparative data in their magazines and some were clearly wanting to move into this area in a much bigger way.

Information services are common and consumer magazines well read – although not many of them bring revenue to the publishing organisation.

One example which does is the Right Choice magazine in Mumbai, an initiative to discover if the Which? subscription magazine model – so successful in the UK – could thrive among India’s developing middle classes.

The magazine is set at a high price for India at 100INR an issue (just more than one GBP and the equivalent of 1.8USD and 1.5EUR).

After a slow start – perhaps to be expected in such a varied population – Right Choice is beginning to gain ground with 25,000 subscribers – 7,000 of them recruited since January this year.

The magazine – like its parent body Which? – takes no advertising and ultimately aims to raise revenue from consumers prepared to subscribe to support services for all consumers – the first expression of which is a 50,000USD fund to be made available from July this year to support consumer advocacy in India.

Right Choice has made an additional commitment to testing Indian products through CERC, bringing much needed revenue to this organisation. 

Sustaining the Indian consumer movement

Investment such as that made by Right Choice in Indian consumer affairs may help a little and the fund raising acuity and ingenuity of Indian organisations in attracting excellently qualified often retired volunteers to the cause means that most organisations teeter along.

But the reality is still that financial sustainability is the key issue for all groups. Project funding – including some from government sources – is all well and good but it is short term, tied to specific activities and contributes little to the organisational infrastructure.

Nothing remains to undertake new initiatives and developments which are both possible and urgently needed.

So, as it is for CI, the outstanding need for Indian COs is for unrestricted, no-strings-attached funding sources which can help increase expertise and modernise services to meet the myriad challenges facing rich and poor Indian consumers alike.