Explained: How farmer protest against Reliance Jio rang out in Punjab

Online classes, mobile banking, railway bookings, e-medicine services take a hit

The green banners outside shops in the Phase 3B2 market in Mohali, a city south-west of Chandigarh, are in your face and convey unequivocal support for the farmers protesting the three farm laws. Alongside them, in some places, are white banners that announce: “Jio Sims and Jio recharge not available here.”

The messages on display at what is one of the busiest markets of the town have been resonating across the state of Punjab where the telecommunications company has found itself at the receiving end of protests that have sometimes turned violent.

In the last one month, Jio services have faced wide-scale disruptions in the state with protesters damaging over 1,560 of its 9,000 mobile towers. Reliance Jio officials, however, say about 2,000 towers were damaged.

The impact has been felt across the state: Moga, Bathinda, Mansa, Patiala, Tarn Taran, Talwandi Sabo, Ludhiana, Faridkot.

And students, who are now depended on online classes and especially those who will soon be appearing for the board exams, have faced the brunt of this. The Punjab government had distributed 175,000 smart phones to Class XII students so that their studies would not be affected because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of these students were using the cost-effective Jio connections.

“Our entire family had Jio connections, and then suddenly the phones started getting disconnected,” says Ludhiana resident Anjula Chahal. “Both my children couldn’t attend their online classes.”

Since most of the farmer protests were concentrated in rural areas, the damages to towers mostly happened in rural Punjab. Apart from education, mobile banking, online railway bookings and online medical consultations were badly affected.

About 40 km from Ludhiana, in the town of Raikot, a Jio tower was extensively damaged, hitting services to all the nearby villages.

The worst affected district was Moga, about 60 km from Ludhiana, where most of the towers were damaged, cables were burnt and in one case a transformer was destroyed. Moga resident Arjun Arora says besides children’s online classes, banking too was hit as transactions on mobile phones remained affected.

Bordering Moga is Bhatinda, where about a dozen Jio towers were damaged in rural areas. West of Bhatinda, the Abohar-Fazilka belt, too suffered mobile connectivity problems because of the damages to the towers.

So severe was the problem that in Fatehgarh Punjtur, some 40 km from Moga, hundreds of villagers ported their connection to other service providers. Many did so in Talwandi town, too.

“My phone stopped functioning for about three days,” says Sukhpreet Singh, a Talwandi resident. “I had no choice but to shift to another service provider.”

And just when things appeared to be getting back to normal and the towers were being repaired, news of damage to yet another Jio tower, in the border district of Tarn Taran, came in.

In Moga, the police filed a complaint against four men for the vandalism, but they were reportedly let off when the villagers gathered at the police station demanding their release. Reliance officials say despite many complaints, no first information report (FIR) was registered against those who vandalised the properties.

Reliance Jio stores across the state – Kapurthala, Patiala, Moga, among other cities — received hundreds of complaints from customers as services got disrupted.

Now, while Jio services in most areas have been restored, a number of people are learnt to have shifted to other service providers.