Clicking under Pressure: Dark Patterns, Urgency Architecture and Consumer Autonomy in India's Quick-Commerce Economy

India’s quick-commerce model makes speed its principal value proposition. The same digital interfaces that reduce transaction costs can, however, compress the time available for reflection through countdowns, scarcity cues, pre-selected add-ons, ranking choices, hidden charges and asymmetric cancellation flows. This article develops “urgency architecture” as an analytical concept for the interaction between rapid delivery and behavioural interface design. It argues that Indian law already contains a substantial basis for intervention through the Consumer Protection Act 2019 (CPA), the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules 2020 (E-Commerce Rules) and the Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns 2023 (Dark Patterns Guidelines), but that enforcement is constrained by evidentiary, temporal, attribution and coordination problems. The article maps recognised dark-pattern categories to legal provisions, compares India with the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and unfair-commercial-practices framework, and uses published market evidence to establish the sector’s scale. It proposes mandatory interface-risk audits, substantiated urgency claims, equal-friction choice architecture, early total-price disclosure, auditable records of material interface experiments, platform-level compliance duties and coordinated enforcement. The central proposition is that speed should reduce delivery time without reducing meaningful consumer choice.