Consumer Blog

Recent reports says that, many Telecom companies have been fined by DOT! In order to inflate their subscriber numbers, most probably, telecom operators are pushing their field marketing agents so much that they are compromising on a serious security issue of verifying customer identity details. Here is the news :

NEW DELHI: The Government has imposed a penalty of a little over Rs 42 crore on the mobile operators for SIM cards bought on fake identity so far, which refers to defaulting on subscriber verification norms.

A Department of Telecom official said the total amount of penalty imposed for SIM cars brought on fake identities on various operators so far is Rs 42.77 crore from June 2008-November 2009.

In 2008-09 alone, DoT had slapped a penalty of Rs 32 crore on the operators for failing to adhere to the subscriber verification norms.

DoT has imposed a penalty of Rs 7.38 crore on the service providers operating in J&K and in Assam, the penalty is Rs 1.76 crore from April-July.

The major defaulting operators are BSNL, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Vodafone, Tatas, Dishnet group, MTNL, Spice Communications, Reliance Telecom, BPL, HFCL Infotel, Sistema-Shyam, said the official.

Fake SIM cards have been used by the terrorists/insurgent groups. The minimum financial penalty is Rs 1,000 per violation of subscriber verification. With the mobile subscriber base growing very fast, this figure is expected to swell further.

Earlier in April, DoT introduced a graded penalty system under which operators pay Rs 50,000 per subscriber if more than 20 per cent of their user base is without valid identity documents.

Source : Economic Times.