Telcos to be fined Rs 1,000 for non-verification

New Delhi, Apr 25 (UNI) The government will impose Rs 1,000 as penalty charges on those telecom operators who fail to verify the identity of the customers, with Tata Teleservices and Spice Telecom performing poorly in this regard.

''We would impose Rs 1,000 penalty per subscriber on telcos for non-compliance of TRAI's order for verification of customers identity,'' Communication and IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran told reporters here today.

In this direction, a sample survey has been done for gauging the performance of various telecom operators.

Reliance and Hutch have shown a good response verifying 93 per cent of their customers followed by Bharti with 90 per cent.

State-owned BSNL have cleared 86 per cent of their verifications while Spice Telecom and Tata Teleservices have done pretty badly, the Minister said.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has approved a final regulation for putting in place a mechanism for reducing the unwanted telemarketing calls.

However, the Authority will declare it effective only after some of the specific provisions not strictly in the domain of TRAI get clearance from the Communication and IT Ministry and the Reserve Bank of India.

Terming these unwanted calls as Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC), the Authority has proposed setting up of a National Do Not Call (NDNC) Registry, which will be a national database containing telephone numbers of the subscribers, who have opted not to receive UCC.

In its regulation the Authority has mandated the telecom service providers to set up a mechanism to receive request from the subscribers who do not want to receive UCC. The service providers will maintain a Private Do Not Call List, which will include telephone numbers and other details of all such subscribers.

The telephone numbers and the area code from this Private Do Not Call List will be updated online by the operators to a National Do Not Call Registry (NDNC) and thus the NDNC will have the telephone numbers of all the subscribers from all over India who have opted not to receive any UCC.

Telemarketers who have been categorised as Other Service Providers (OSPs) will have to register in the NDNC Registry.

The telemarketers would submit online the calling list to the NDNC registry where the list will be scrubbed by excluding the numbers listed in the registry and the scrubbed list will be online transferred back to the telemarketer for making calls.

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