Fine on unwanted calls:Trai ready for battle

TELECOM TANGLE

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) said it was ready for a legal battle if the telecom operators moved the court challenging its decision to impose penalties on service providers for unsolicited calls to the subscribers.

"There is no question of rolling back the decision. If the operators move court challenging the move, we are ready to fight them," a Trai official said in New Delhi on the sidelines of Convergence India, an ICT exhibition.

The telecom regulator had on Monday said that for the first unsolicited communication, a service provider would have to pay a penalty of up to Rs 5,000, which could go up to Rs 20,000 for each subsequent call.

The telecom operators' associations yesterday strongly opposed the decision, which they said was "unfair".

In a letter to the telecom regulator, the operators had also stated that they were "greatly discouraged and concerned that the authority is seeking to impose penalties (financial disincentives) on service providers for the unsolicited commercial calls made by telemarketing agencies over whom they have little or no control".

The letter, jointly written by both the GSM and CDMA operators' associations "" the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) and the Association of United Service Providers of India (AUSPI), also stated that there was no way a service provider could ensure that the telemarketer had scrubbed the calling list in an appropriate manner before making the sales call.

In spite of all the efforts made by service providers to ensure that all telemarketers register, only 13,600 telemarketers have registered with the national 'Do-Not-Call Registry', out of an estimated total of over 75,000, it said.

"It is this poor compliance by the telemarketers and their institutions concerned that needs to be urgently addressed to protect the consumers and not demotivate the service providers through penalties for actions for which they are not responsible," the letter added.

The entire industry is also discouraged by this regulation since "we have all been going out of our way and making all possible efforts to put in systems so as to enable the authority's Unsolicited Commercial Call (UCC) regulation to be effective".

The associations also mentioned that their members had set up a common four-digit number (1909) for registering with the Do-Not-Call Registry.

"When all this has been done and more and more efforts are being undertaken, we are taken aback at this latest regulation, which seeks to penalise the service providers rather than tackle the root cause of the problem created by the errant telemarketers and the institutions concerned, like banks, credit card agencies and hotels," it added.

Trai, on its part, had said, "The objective is to increase the effectiveness of compliance of these regulations by providing financial disincentive to non-compliant telecom service providers and thereby reducing the nuisance and inconvenience to the subscribers from the unsolicited telemarketing calls/messages."