Keep on your toes if you don’t want shopkeepers to take you for a ride. This is the message the state legal metrology section of the department of consumer affairs is trying to inject in consumers in Howrah.

A four-day campaign, launched by the department in the Howrah station area on Wednesday, is aimed at making people aware of the dishonest practices followed by traders.

“Traders operating in and around the Howrah station are known for cheating consumers with small measures and spurious products,” said secretary of the consumer affairs (Howrah branch) Pradip Bhattacharya on Wednesday.

After a sustained campaign till Thursday, the consumer affairs department will crack down on vendors in the station area and check the scales and weights used by them, with the help of its legal metrology wing.

According to a consumer affairs department estimate, buyers in Howrah are cheated of more than 50,000 kg a day on various items.

“Unleaded weights and hand-scales used by most sellers are illegal. As a result, buyers take home not more that 800 grams of a product after coughing up the price for one kg,” Bhattacharya added.

Some of the tips prescribed in the campaign are:

• Avoid hand-scale without index

• Check if the underside of the weights carry leaded seals

• An electronic scale will always read ‘00’ when it is in neutral state

• Before weighing a product in the electronic scale, ask the shopkeeper to place a weight on the scale and verify whether it gives the correct reading or not

• When buying liquids, make sure the measuring pot used by the shopkeeper is certified

• Insist on the shopkeeper filling the measuring pot till the liquid spills out through a hole near the brim.

• In case of a packaged product, make sure its generic name is mentioned on the packet (like sodium chloride in case of table salt)

• See if the price tag printed on the packet has been tampered with or blurred by rubbing