■ Mr Jhugroo, can we start by talking about your organization? What exactly is its role?

The Institute for Consumer Protection has existed since 1983 and our main role is to protect the consumers’ economic interests and also talk about what their rights and responsibilities are. So, we give advice and tell consumers to act responsibly by asserting their rights as well. The organization started as a breast feeding promotion group, monitoring the code of marketing of breast milk substitutes.

■ How did that morph into consumer protection?

Very interesting question. When we were promoting breast feeding, we worked with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and we trained our people to become breast feeding counselors. While promoting breast feeding, there was another problem of protecting consumers from the infant food industry which was hammering consumers and trying to influence mothers that commercial milk was better than breast milk. It started with consumer’s health, and then we joined Consumer International (CI). The CI told us that what we were doing was good, but that we should also consider other aspects of consumer protection apart from health. So we set up the Institute for Consumer Protection (ICP).

■ What is your background?

I started as a teacher. I was teaching in secondary school and when we set up Mauritian Action for the Promotion of Breast Feeding, the workload soon became so heavy that I had to give up teaching and work full-time for the organization.

■ So your job is not just to act a watchdog, is it?

No. Although the ICP still acts as a watchdog, instead of just criticizing they look at the problem from various angles. For instance, if a company is about to launch a new product, they seek advice from us to see if consumers will be happy with the product.

■ And how would you know what makes the consumer happy?

What we do is launch a consumer focus group or a consumer panel, charge the company for the service and proactively look at the problem from all angles, criticize and scrutinize, and then advise the company.

■ Do these companies actually need your advice? Don’t they have market research analysts to do this for them?

Yes, they do but market research would cost them a lot, which in turn would be passed on to the customers, whereas if we advise them, they will not have to pay much and ultimately the consumer will pay less because the cost of production will go down. So everybody is a winner.

■ So your aim is no more looking at prices and advising you’re talking about analysis and market research.

We do what we call customer satisfaction surveys to see how consumers feel about the product or the service. We also look at prices and analyze the different components which go into them. The details of the price determination are very important.

Consumers need to know what they are paying for. Did you know that when you buy sugar, part of the cost that goes into it is the compensation that the government is paying to the dockers?
 
■ But why do we have to pay for this compensation?

Because that is something that was agreed with the “Syndicat du Sucre” when the dockers were laid off. So each time you buy sugar, part of the money goes towards that compensation.

In the same way that we are paying for the hedging of STC each time we buy petrol.

■ Yes, but telling me this does not make me pay less as a consumer, does it?

It should because the purpose is to look at costs that can be removed. For instance, we have spoken about this compensation to the dockers. This is one of the fights that we are going to lead soon. We want to know why we are still paying for the dockers now instead of the sugar industry which has been raking in all the profits. For how long are we going to pay? It’s the same thing when it comes to prices worked out by the importers or distributors. There are costs that you can reduce. If there is too much advertising, for example, we could look at that as well. If you look around the island, you will find an explosion in advertising, whether on billboards, bus bodies, etc. I even heard this industry is worth billions. Who do you think is paying for that if not consumers?

Read the full interview on l’express e-paper.