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| 20% telecom users unverified: Govt | | | AGENCIES
NEW DELHI, Oct 21: A concerted effort to weed out unverified telecom users from the network in light of terrorists using cellphones to trigger blasts has
failed to yield results. A probe initiated by the Department of Telecom has found that as many as 20% of the over 300 million subscribers are unverified and may have been issued connections based on bogus identity and address proof. The findings are based on the reports of monthly audit.
Failure of the telecom companies to follow due diligence process is likely to cost them very dear with the government deciding to impose a hefty penalty of Rs 1,000 for each subscriber who was unverified and whose address and identity proof was found to be fake.
Communication and IT minister A Raja informed the Lok Sabha on Monday that instructions for verification were issued to all mobile telephone service providers to ensure adequate verification of all subscribers and to disconnect connections provided without proper verification. However, the minister said DoT’s monthly audit reports revealed that the correct subscriber verification on an average was only 80% where photograph and copies of identity and address proof were found to be in order. “All the service providers are lacking in meeting the requisite compliance of instructions relating to 100% subscriber verification,” Raja said.
The minister said it was decided “to impose financial penalty of Rs 1,000 per unverified subscriber on the defaulting service providers”. In May, TOI had reported that in a game of one-upmanship, mobile companies were allegedly selling thousands of pre-activated SIMs and post-paid connections every month paying scant regard to the customer verification norms and due diligence process. |
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