4 kg onion bought at Rs 9 per kg weighed 400g less; Reliance Smart Bazaar, Reliance Retail ordered to pay Rs 20,000

A shopper in Ropar walked into a Reliance Smart Bazaar store, took up a festive onion offer, and ended up in a consumer court over 400 grams of missing weight. The District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, Ropar, has now ordered Reliance Smart Bazaar and Reliance Retail Limited to pay him Rs 20,000, holding that the store supplied underweight onions and then failed to address his complaint on the spot.

The case shows how a small billing offer, and the store's response to a customer's doubt about it, can turn into a full unfair trade practice ruling. The commission leaned almost entirely on a video the customer recorded inside the store, in which he can be heard telling staff the onion packets were short in weight and asking for a senior official to come and check.

What was the onion offer at Reliance Smart Bazaar

A resident of Meera Bai Chowk in Ropar, shopped at the Reliance Smart Bazaar store in the town on April 25, 2026. His bill came to Rs 3,299. Under a running promotion, anyone spending more than Rs 999 could buy two sealed 2 kg onion packets at Rs 9 per kg. He took the offer and paid Rs 36 for what should have added up to 4 kg of onions.

The weighing machine inside the store told a different story
Before leaving the store, he put the two onion packets on the store's own weighing machine. Instead of 4 kg together, the scale showed around 3.57 kg. Checked one by one, one packet weighed close to 1.79 kg and the other about 1.78 kg, both short of the 2 kg marked on the packet. That works out to roughly 400 grams missing across the two packets.

He recorded this weighing on video and asked the staff present to call someone responsible from the store to look into it. According to the order, no senior staff member came to check the packets despite his request. He later took this footage, along with his bill and the sealed packets, to the consumer commission.

What the customer asked the commission for
In his complaint, he asked the commission to act against the store for unfair trade practice, refund the extra amount he paid for underweight onions, and award him Rs 50,000 for mental harassment and inconvenience. He also sought Rs 20,000 towards litigation costs and asked for punitive damages so the store would not repeat this with other customers.

How Reliance Smart Bazaar and Reliance Retail defended the case
Reliance Smart Bazaar and its parent company Reliance Retail Limited, named as the two opposite parties, told the commission there was no visible weight discrepancy in the sealed onion packets at the time of sale. They said once the customer raised an online complaint, the store contacted him and asked him to come back so the packets could be physically re-weighed and the issue sorted out. He did not take up this offer and went to the consumer commission instead. The company called his complaint baseless and said he had suffered no real loss.

Why the commission sided with the customer
The commission, headed by president Kuljit Pal Singh along with members Ranvir Kaur and Ramesh Kumar Gupta, watched the video evidence the customer submitted. It noted that the recording clearly showed him informing the store staff about the underweight packets and asking for a responsible officer, and that nobody from the store came to resolve it at that moment.

In its order, the commission said this pointed to negligence and deficiency in service on the part of the store, and called it arrogance on the store's part not to bother about a customer who had raised a genuine complaint. It rejected the argument that Taluja's refusal to revisit the store weakened his case, since the underweight supply itself had already been established at the point of sale.


What the commission ordered
The commission held that supplying underweight onion packets amounted to an unfair trade practice and deficiency in service. It partly allowed the complaint and directed Reliance Smart Bazaar and Reliance Retail Limited, jointly and severally, to pay teh customer a combined Rs 20,000 towards compensation and litigation expenses. The two companies have one month from receiving the certified copy of the order to make this payment. If they miss that deadline, the amount will start drawing 9 percent annual interest until it is paid in full.