Mumbai: A day after Fincorporate ported consumers activists asking the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE), a statutory body under the Ministry of Power, Government of India (GoI) to direct withdrawal of certain models of Hitachi Air Conditioners and seeking compensation for buyers who were lured by false claims to buy them, a consumer body wrote the BEE seeking similar alerts for washing machines and other air conditioners brands too.
MGP's letter to BEE director
The Mumbai Grahak Panchayat (MGP), a consumer body, on Tuesday wrote to the director of the BEE. In its letter, besides mentioning the demands that were reported by the FPJ in its August 22 issue, MGP sought to know from BEE whether it will direct Hitachi to withdraw failed rating air conditioners from the location of consumers homes, withdraw existing stock of failed rating air conditioners from market, will BEE direct Hitachi to compensate consumers as they were lured by wrong rating to buy the product, directed to give correct advertisements, systems in place to check such ratings do not get passed into open market and what about air conditioners of others models?
“We compliment BEE to come out with such an alert but it triggered some more questions so we reached out to them,” said advocate Shirish Deshpande, chairman, MGP who wrote the letter. When FPJ contacted the director's office at BEE, there was no response.
A company statement by Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning India Limited stated: “Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning India Limited is aware of the failure that has been reported by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE). As a part of product life cycle assessment process, we identified that a few models were on borderline of meeting energy efficiency criteria. We took necessary corrective actions, stopping production of a few models including of Window RAC RAW511HEDO from April 2021 and of Fixed Speed Split RAC RSNG318HEDO from May 2022 which have been reported as failure by BEE. We appreciate the efforts of BEE and we will continue to maintain the trust of our consumers by investing towards delivering nothing but the best.” However, it did not respond to other demands like compensation and withdrawal of stock.
