Consumer forums erupt in satisfaction. Op-ed writers discover, briefly, a cause that unites everyone. It is a deeply satisfying story. It has a villain, a victim, a resolution, and crucially, a bill you can photograph and post. The only serious problem with it is that it leaves out roughly half of what is actually happening.
The Delhi High Court’s Single Judge ruling in[i] National Restaurant Association of India & Ors. v. Union of India & Anr. & Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India & Ors. v. Union of India & Anr, upholding the Central Consumer Protection Authority’s (CCPA) Guidelines banning mandatory service charges has been celebrated in op-eds and consumer forums as a long-overdue reckoning. What those celebrations quietly skip over is this: the matter is still being litigated. NRAI and FHRAI have appealed. The fat lady has not sung. She hasn’t even cleared her throat.
So here, for those with the appetite for it, is the argument that isn’t being made stated as well as it deserves to be stated, which is considerably better than it has been so. Before the verdict of public opinion hardens into concrete, here is something radical, the other side of the argument, stated honestly.
The Constitution Gave Restaurants Rights Too
Article 19(1)(g) is not a footnote. It is a fundamental right, the right of every Indian citizen to carry on any trade or business. That right can be restricted, yes, but only by “reasonable restrictions” under Article 19(6), and the Supreme Court has been consistent: a restriction must be proportionate to the evil it addresses. Not just related to it. Proportionate!!!
Here is where the CCPA Guidelines stumble. Nobody in the restaurant industry is arguing that hiding charges in fine print is acceptable. Nobody is defending bills designed to look like complicated tax invoices. Those are genuine wrongs, and genuine wrongs deserve genuine remedies. The question, the real legal question, is whether the remedy is disclosure or prohibition.
These are not the same thing. An establishment that prints “a 10% service charge applies to all tables” on the front page of its menu, in readable font, has told you everything you need to know before you order. You have the option to walk out. That is informed consent, properly understood. The CCPA chose to prohibit the charge entirely rather than mandate its clear disclosure, and that choice, the Petitioners argue, goes further than Article 19(6) allows.
The Waiter at the End of This Story
Every article about restaurant service charges is written from the customer’s chair. This is understandable. Most journalists eat at restaurants. Fewer of them carry plates in one.
Here is the human cost nobody wants to discuss. For roughly eighty years, service charges in Indian hotels and restaurants have been woven into the compensation fabric of food service workers. When a regulator eliminates a revenue stream overnight, someone absorbs that loss.
It isn’t the restaurant owner eating at his own table. It is the server who counted on that supplementary income to make rent. If consumer welfare is the lodestar, surely the welfare of the consumer’s waiter counts for something, too.
Why is the Biryani alone on Trial?
Book a flight today. The base fare will be one number. By the time you’ve added fuel surcharge, convenience fee, seat selection, and the inexplicable “carrier-imposed charge,” you will have paid forty per cent more than the headline figure. Nobody is issuing guidelines about airline pricing. Nobody is asking online food delivery apps to charge their platform fee only if it’s a “voluntary contribution.”
This selective targeting of restaurants raises a constitutional question that the Division Bench cannot comfortably sidestep: if the principle underlying the Guidelines is that supplementary charges added to a base price constitute an unfair trade practice, why does that principle apply exclusively to the biryani and not to the boarding pass?
Article 14 guarantees equal treatment. Singling out one industry without a reasoned distinction that separates it from equally analogous industries is exactly the kind of arbitrary classification the equality guarantee was designed to prevent.
The Shelf Full of Proportionate Remedies Nobody Chose
The Petitioners are not asking the Division Bench to rubber-stamp exploitation. They are asking it to find a proportionate answer, and there are several available, each more targeted than an outright ban.
Mandatory disclosure at the entrance, on the menu cover, and as a clearly labeled line item on the bill, separated visually from GST and other statutory levies, would eliminate the deception argument entirely. Standardized language would eliminate confusion. Liability for non-disclosure, with teeth, would deter the bad actors without punishing the establishments that disclose properly.
Half-Time, Not Full-Time
The restaurant business in India runs on margins thin enough to read a newspaper through. Post-pandemic recovery is incomplete. Input costs have risen. And now, in the middle of all of this, an industry with a legitimate legal argument backed by constitutional provisions, Supreme Court precedents, and eighty years of labour practice, is being told by popular discourse that it has no case worth hearing. It does.
The legal fight is not over. The courtroom is the right place to have it, not the comment section. The comment section already has its verdict. The Constitution gets to have one too…
[i] (2025 SCC OnLine Del 1975)
Advocate Aiswarya Jose
Advocate Ajit N Makhijani
M M Legal Associates