The Government is planning to finalise and notify an upgraded penalty structure after its strategy of imposing fines on companies with unverified mobile phone subscribers paid marginal dividends.
This will be the Government’s second attempt to make phone companies fall in line with customer verification norms. Once earlier in the wake of the Mumbai attacks in 2008, the penalty system had been changed following representations from telecom companies.
The Department of Telecom (DoT) has been invoking licence conditions to impose penalties on companies slow in verifying whether subscribers have complied with the formalities of providing their residential address and other details.
By approaching the Telecom Dispute Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) and getting a favourable order, companies have made the DoT’s work tougher and left their officers surprised.
A senior official felt the TDSAT should not even have entertained the petition since this related to the security of the nation and they had been clearly told that they would be endangering this aspect if unverified customers were enrolled.
The Department of Telecom has always drawn short when penalising private companies. Every year about two dozen telecom operators attract penalties for various offences but the actual money flowing to the Government Exchequer has hovered around the 15 to 20 per cent mark.
This is more pronounced in case of penalties imposed on seven telecom firms including the state owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited.
Touching on this aspect, a report by the Controller and Auditor General of India (CAG) noticed that out of Rs 2506.80 crores in penalty between 2009 and 2012, companies paid less than Rs. 400 crores.
While RCom and Airtel between them account for almost 40 per cent of the dues, BSNL and Vodafone also owe substantial sums to the Government. Idea Cellular and and Tata Teleservices have dues of about Rs. 70 crores each.
According to DoT, these phone companies have been unable to account for the identity and residence proofs of over 4.5 crore SIM cards. The official said the DoT is not making the case that all subscribers fall in the questionable category but companies should have paid heed to the country’s national security interests while competing with each other to enrol more customers.
