Mobile cos to pay higher penalty on unverified users

The following is from "Business Line", a business paper of "The Hindu", group of Chennai.

Trust but verify
Under the new rules they will have to pay a penalty of Rs 50,000 (Rs 1,000 currently) per subscriber if they have more than 20 per cent of their user base without proper identity documents

Thomas K. Thomas


New Delhi, Feb. 7 In a bid to address concerns raised by security agencies, the Department of Telecom has further tightened the mobile subscriber verification norms.

DoT has decided that operators will have to pay a penalty of Rs 50,000 per subscriber if they have more than 20 per cent of their user base without proper identity documents. At present, operators pay only Rs 1,000 for every unverified mobile subscriber.

From April onwards, DoT will introduce a graded penalty system whereby operators will have to pay out more if they have a higher number of unverified subscribers. So, if a mobile operator has less than 5 per cent of its user base in a circle that is unverified, the he penalty is Rs 1,000 for each user without proper documents.

If the operator is found to have between 5 and 10 per cent of its subscribers unverified then the penalty will be Rs 5,000. The levy will increase to Rs 10,000 if the operator has only 85 per cent of its user base verified and for those operators with only 80 per cent verification completed, the penalty will be Rs 20,000 per subscriber.

DoT’s vigilance officers will conduct random checks every month to determine the extent of violation by the operators. The move to increase the penalty comes after security agencies pointed out that the existing fine of Rs 1,000 was too low to act as deterrent against giving out connections to anyone without proper documents.

The move to increase the penalty will hurt the mobile operators as they are also under pressure to sustain the growth in subscriber addition every month. Operators are adding more than 10 million new subscribers each month in a bid to compensate for lower average revenue per user and declining minutes of usage.

“While we are doing everything we can to comply with the norms, it takes time to verify each subscriber. So, at any given time, DoT’s vigilance officers will find a few unverified subscribers if they take a random sample,” said a GSM operator.

On 23rd Jan, I had posted a piece on our blog on having a National Identity Card
I would repeat that we should use this opportunity where the Telecom operators have to verify all their customers to issue the cards so that all genuine citizens are recorderd, once and for all, so that illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Pakistan are identified and sent back.