A PIL has been filed in the Bombay High Court seeking guidelines to curb black marketing and ticket scalping at major events. This comes in the backdrop of alleged foul play during the online ticket sale for British band Coldplay's highly anticipated concert in Navi Mumbai in January 2025. The plea was mentioned on Monday for urgent hearing before a division bench of Chief Justice D K Upadhyaya and Justice Amit Borkar.
The public interest litigation (PIL), filed by advocate Amit Vyas, said there are several irregularities and illegalities in the sale of tickets for major events, such as concerts, live shows, and so on. Such irregularities and illegalities were witnessed last month when tickets for the Coldplay concert were made available on the BookMyShow platform, he claimed in the petition.
An advocate appearing for Vyas informed the HC that certain secondary websites are still selling tickets for the Coldplay concert at exorbitant prices. The bench noted that a police inquiry was on and posted the matter for hearing in November after the Diwali vacation. The plea sought the court to lay down stringent guidelines for preventing black marketing, ticket touting, and scalping of online tickets for such major events.
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The PIL claimed that such illegal means were rampant during the IPL matches, the cricket World Cup matches in 2023, and the concerts of singers Taylor Swift and Diljit Dosanjh. Organizers and ticketing partners exploited fans by listing the tickets on secondary ticket websites for exorbitant prices.
Such irregularities were recently seen when tickets were being sold last month on the online ticketing website BookMyShow for the Coldplay concert to be held in January 2025, the petition claimed. "The sale of online tickets was apparently manipulated by BookMyShow platform in such a manner that even before mid-noon on the day the tickets were made available, people got logged out and were not allowed to access the website for purchase of tickets," the PIL alleged.
Within minutes, tickets for all three shows were shown as sold out on the BookMyShow portal, even as tickets were later found available on a secondary website at exorbitant prices. Vyas last month filed a police complaint against the same with the city police's Economic Offences Wing and an inquiry is on into it.
In the plea, Vyas said such illegal practices have deprived people of their fundamental right to have an equal opportunity to access public entertainment. "The Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 mandate e-commerce entities to ensure fair and non-deceptive practices. However, in the absence of effective regulations in the ticketing sector, entities such as BookMyShow are not complying with the rules," the PIL claimed.