Page 216 - Health, Population and Environment Education 9

9.1 Consumer and Consumers’ Health

Introduction to consumers’ health
Human beings need many things in their daily life. Some of the needs are produced by
themselves and some of their needs are purchased from the market. Those things that
are sold in the market are also produced buy some other producers. This shows that
no one in the world can produce all the things needed for his/her life himself/herself.
For fulfilling majority of their needs they have to depend on either the producers or the
distributors. Similarly, the human beings also need different types of services like health,
communication, education, transportation, etc. in their daily life. For these services too,
they need to depend on the service renders. Therefore, we can say that all the people need
to depend upon other people to get the necessary goods and services. So, we can say that
a consumer is a person or persons, institutions that consumes goods and services from the
producers or distributors.

Fig: 1
Harvesting tomatoes Buying vegetables in grocery

According to the Consumer Protection Act 2054 B.S., “A consumer is a person or institution
that consumes the goods and services available in the market.”

In other words a consumer can also be defined as “A person who buys the products or
services for personal use and not for manufacture or re-sale.”
The consumers consume goods and services from different places. On the basis of the
area of production of goods and the people who consume those goods the consumers are
also classified into different types. For example, in a family, if the goods produced by a
family member is to be consumed buy other members in the family, such consumers are
called family consumers. Similarly, those consumers who consume goods and services
produced only in their own regions/area, they are known as regional consumers. On the
other hand, some consumers consume goods and services produced in Nepal only such
consumers are known as national consumers. Similarly, some consumers consume only
imported goods and services. They don’t consume the goods and services from their own
country. Such type of consumers are called international consumers. In this sense, every
individual is one or different type of consumer because everyone has to buy goods to
fulfill his/her needs and desires.

216 GREEN Environment Population and Health Education Book-9