In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, Kapil Sibal, Minister of Communications and IT, has said that until April 2012, 28,000 telephones have been disconnected and over 44,000 notices have been issued to telemarketers, say news reports.
This is on grounds of violation of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India?s (TRAI) Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2010. This was implemented in September 2011.
As per the regulations, subscribers can register with the National Customer Preference Register (NCPR) to either bar all commercial communication under the ‘fully blocked’ category, or receive SMSes in chosedn categories by registering themselves in the ‘partially blocked’ category.
As per TRAI data a total of 161.66 million customers have registered their preference on NCPR as of March 29, 2012.
Further, the regulation states that if an unsolicited commercial communication originates from a subscriber who is not registered with the regulator as a telemarketer, the service provider shall issue a disconnection notice to that subscriber. Since the implementation of regulations, TRAI has penalised 94 telemarketers and blacklisted four telemarketers.
