India is, unfortunately, having a culture of mild scamming
First, full disclosure. As I travel between India and the USA, I can clearly see a culture in India where people try to scam you just to get what they want. Not the big, criminal kind. The mild kind - the small mind trickery that has been around for so long that it no longer registers as a trick.
The clearest example I have is a jar of Bournvita.
My cousin is diabetic. It is an outright battle, and there is so much she has to go through. I wish there was a tool for it. On top of that, when I see companies trying to profit off things that can have such a drastic impact on the people who drink them, it feels very bad.
She started drinking Bournvita. I was skeptical, because Bournvita was known for having sugar in it. She said this one is zero sugar. So I picked up the jar and checked the label, almost hoping to find that India had changed and that there really was a zero-sugar product on the shelf.
There wasn’t. “Zero” was printed very large. “added sugar” was in small letters under it. The pack had 22% sugar, and she has to cut down on sugar a lot. She was not even aware, so false marketing has led to a health impact.
The fine print is the part worth reading. The sugar is not added to the jar - it is already in the cereal extract and the milk solids. So the claim is technically true, which is the whole point. Enough is said to be legal, an exit is left open for the company, and the front of the pack says something a diabetic will read the way she wants to read it.
That is what I mean by mild scamming. People try to trick you into buying their product instead of just saying outright what this is and what it is not. Fool someone, keep sufficient evidence to have an exit, and nothing ever comes back to you. It is a very bad culture, and bad mechanics. A bad ad costs you money. This one costs people their health, and the cost lands on the person who trusted the label, not on the company that printed it.
The same instinct runs in smaller places - standing in the middle of a door so that nobody can get out. Different stakes, same mechanics: my convenience now, the cost on someone else, and no repercussion for me.
I am not sure why people do it. Maybe because it works, and because there is no cost to it. But I have been part of this culture too. Even now, after a break, when I come back, it is just hard to ignore these things.