Embarrassment: Rs300,000 sought for defective phone

Petitioner said his friends had made fun of him because of the faulty phone.

LAHORE:

A consumer court on Wednesday issued a notice to a proprietor in a suit seeking Rs300,000 as damages for allegedly selling the petitioner a defective mobile phone that “caused him embarrassment in front of his friends”.

Petitioner Muhammad Sarwar said that he had purchased a second-hand Nokia phone from Muhammad Iqbal, the proprietor of Pakistan Mobile, Islampura, for Rs9,000 a few weeks ago. He said Iqbal had told him that he would take complete responsibility if the phone was faulty.

A few days later, Sarwar said, he was hanging out with his friends and he took out his phone to send a text message but some of the phone’s keys were not working properly. He said his friends made fun of him and he felt embarrassed.

Sarwar said that he complained to Iqbal about the faulty keys. He said Iqbal told him to bring the phone to his shop for repairs but then refused to fix it. Sarwar asked the court to direct Iqbal to pay him Rs300,000 as damages.

Iqbal denied the allegations and said the petitioner had changed the phone’s body and the new buttons were not working properly. He said the buttons on the body he had sold had worked perfectly well.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 14^th, 2013.