In continuation of the subscriber re-verification issue, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has informed the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) that the operators under the scanner with regard to this issue have still not paid the required penalty amounts.
These operators include Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Dishnet Wireless (Aircel), Reliance Telecom, Idea Cellular and Bharti Hexacom.
These operators face a fine as they were unable to carry out the process of re-verifying prepaid connections in the Assam and North East circles.
Prior to this, the Telecom Enforcement Resource and Monitoring (TERM) Cell of DoT had imposed a penalty on the operators in this context.
The operators had challenged this penalty and had approached TDSAT to waive off the same. The operators are not in favor of undertaking re-verification of their entire pre-paid subscriber base and have termed the circular issued by government as one issued ?in a casual manner”.
According to them, DoT extended the directive issued in the circle of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) to Assam and North East Service Areas. Since, these guidelines were initially formulated by keeping in mind the peculiar conditions existing in J&K, the same cannot be applicable to the areas of North East. Thus, a proper modification of this directive should be done before issuing it.
The operators believe that the entire process may result into a loss of around 20 million subscribers in the northeastern region.
Thereafter, TDSAT revised its order in the case, as per which, operators had to pay 25 per cent of the fine, according to the old slab system.
The old slab system refers to the graded scales system as per which the penalty amount is decided based on the percentage of unverified subscribers.
