Legal Responses to Economic Liberalization: The Case of Unfair Trade Practices

Abstract

This paper traces the evolution of law and practices in the past 20 years focusing on one aspect of unfair trade practices — unfairness in holding of games, contests, lotteries, and similar schemes for promoting sales and services in the context of India transitioning from a state controlled to a liberalized economy. With competition in the economy, firms have got into aggressive and competitive trade practices to entice the customers. These practices raise questions about the truthfulness and fairness of representation of products, services, advertisements, and schemes and modalities for promotion of products and services. There is a need for adequate law against unfair trade practices and a justice delivery system to have some ‘rules of the game’ to compete among themselves. The Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices (MRTP) Act, 1969, was amended in 1984 to introduce a chapter on unfair trade practices. One of the provisions pertained to the holding of games and lotteries. It stated that ‘the conduct of any contest, lottery, game of chance or skill’ for promoting sales, services or business interest was an unfair trade practice and should, therefore, be disallowed. Following the provision, the MRTP Commission had stopped almost all promotion schemes which had an element of draw or lottery. For example, Whirlpool Ltd. had launched a ‘Scratch a Gift Scheme’ and Coca-Cola Ltd. had introduced a promotional scheme for Coke. Considering them to be lottery schemes, the Commission had restrained the companies. The judgement of the Supreme Court in the ‘Horlicks Hidden Wealth Prize Offer’ changed the entire scenario. The Commission considered this scheme to be a kind of lottery and, thus, an unfair trade practice. However, the Supreme Court, in its short judgement in 1998, commented that this was not a case of lottery as there was no draw of lots or that a price was charged for participation in the draw. The fact that some bottles of Horlicks contained a slip of paper which entitled the buyer to a prize is not a lottery in the ordinary sense of the word. Following the judgement, in all the pending cases before the Commission, the parties successfully argued that their schemes did not attract the provision of unfair trade practice as they had not charged extra for participation in the scheme. Ever since, there has been no restraint on holding of such promotion schemes. In this context, the firms would need to do the following: objectively examine if such schemes have any effect on the promotion of products demonstrate the genuineness of a scheme by disclosing vital information work towards formulating appropriate regulations.