Pakistan Information & News

NEW DELHI: The government on Wednesday said 40% of pre-paid mobile subscribers did not fully meet the requirement of subscriber verification, leading to gross violation of instructions by service providers.

“It was observed that service providers in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Haryana did not fully comply with the instructions on subscriber verification,” communication and IT minister Dayanidhi Maran said in a written reply in Lok Sabha.

In the sample checked, the minister said, it was observed that in pre-paid subscribers about 60% and in post-paid about 93% fully met the prescribed requirement of subscriber verification.

Notices have been issued to the concerned service providers in the above areas to discard such connections that have been provided without proper verification and also to explain why action should not be taken against them for not complying with the terms and conditions of the licence agreement.

Maran said the department of telecommunications (DoT) had carried out checks in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Haryana regarding subscriber verification.

Although, in the post paid segment 93% of the subscribers met the requirement of verification but the fact remained that of the total number of users of about 110 million, nearly 80% are understood to be in the pre-paid segment in which 40% subscribers did not meet the required norms.

The service providers have been pleading with the government that lack of proper verification documents like ration card or passport has led to such a situation.

In fact, the service providers are trying to pass the buck to the government for not issuing unique identification to the citizens for such a situation. The leading service providers are Reliance, Tata in the CDMA based services while Bharti, Hutch and Idea offer GSM based cellular services.