A total penalty of Rs.2,179.41 crore was imposed on telecom operators till September 30, 2014, for violation of customer verification guidelines, Minister for Communications and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad said here on Wednesday.
“The verification of identity of mobile phone users is mandatory and the Department of Telecommunications has been issuing instructions from time-to-time for verification of mobile phone users. The department has issued the latest instructions on August 9, 2012, on subscriber verification,” the Minister said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.
The maximum penalty of Rs.486.48 crore has been imposed on Aircel, followed by Reliance Communications (Rs.454.62 crore), BSNL (Rs.329.14 crore), Bharti Airtel (Rs.309.87 crore), Vodafone (Rs.211.85 crore) and Idea Cellular (Rs.123.44 crore).
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Further, a penalty of Rs.172.80 crore was imposed on Tata, Rs.52.31 crore on Sistema Shyam Teleservices, Rs.11.65 crore on Uninor, Rs.11.17 crore on MTNL and Rs.10.92 crore on STel.
Mr. Prasad said the department had found from the audit of customer application forms (CAF) that only about 4 per cent of CAF were non-compliant to the subscriber verification guidelines during 2013-14.
The reasons for non-compliance include missing CAFs, missing photo/proof of identity/proof of address on CAF, subscriber’s acquisition based on apparently forged documents, pre-activated mobile connections and bulk connections issued to an individual or a company or an organisation.
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