Negotiating Unethical Business Practices: Consumers in Urban Housing Market

Presumably, a 'consumer' suffers most when the market is speculative, exploitative, non-transparent and operates with no authority to regulate the market irregularities. The urban housing market in India is a case in point. The present paper, which forms part of a larger empirical study, suggests that the consumers in urban housing market frequent a series of tricky practices, termed as "critical issues", which are neither avoidable nor acceptable to them.The number of 'registered disputes' do not actually reveal the magnitude of close encounters with such issues as these do not always mature as 'dispute' requiring formal institutional intervention. Response of the consumers to 'critical issues' is not uniform. Individual difference in response is influenced by one's affordability of damage/loss caused by deception and/or, one's own assessment of self to withstand the probable 'costs' associated with resolution through formal dispute redressal mechanism. Chronic shortage of urban housing (that increases the chances of speculation), limited success of the state to ensure rigid enforcement of rules to contain deception, inadequate concern of the market for consumer justice and ignorance/reluctance of the consumers to 'contest' allow unethical practices in urban housing market to perpetuate. A set of strategies has been prescribed.