Economic Highlights

New Delhi, 16 May, 2016

If Call Drop Penalty Illegal

CONSUMERS IN TROUBLE

By Shivaji Sarkar

The blemish in India’s much-lauded telecom revolution is a widely recurring phenomenon called “call drops.” In a country which is the world’s second-largest mobile user market after China, fast-paced expansion coupled with inadequate infrastructure and overloaded networks is leading to many callers being cut off mid-sentence!

Naturally, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) awarded Re 1 for call drop subject to a maximum of Rs 3 a day. And the operators cried foul as it would cost them Rs 200 crore per quarter (Rs 800 crore a year) which they thought was untenable logic. Yet, it also could be interpreted as the caller awarding Rs 800 crore bonus to companies for their poor service.

Pertinently, it is not a loss to the operators but what TRAI suggested is a cap on their illicit and unethical income. Though nobody has directly accused the operators of doing it deliberately, many alleged that they were increasing their earnings by engineering the drops or call disconnect. Any wonder the High Court upheld the TRAI order and found the telecom services deficient.

Notably, even this scribe during his visit to the Simhasth Kumbh early this month found disconnects while trying to make a call or receiving one. And each time, if one was also on roaming, the charges were being deducted. Shockingly, internet services on a phone too were not working but when one tried to connect, one was losing money to the operators despite one being unable to use the services.

Moreover, this is not only embarrassing, irritating but also frustrating. Does one pays for his inability to have services? This is queer.

Technically speaking, a call drop represents the service provider’s inability to maintain a call, either incoming or outgoing, once it has been correctly connected. Undeniably, in India, call drops are a performance indicator for the country’s telecom networks.

In many cities, mobile users have to rush from one room to another or drive around neighbourhoods to find better signals and better voice quality. Some angry users are going so far as accusing telecom services providers, who charge for a call by the minute, of deliberately engineering call drops to increase revenues.

Alongside, India is adding millions of new mobile users each quarter and the country’s active subscriber base of 869 million is fast closing in on a billion. However, telecom operators have been unable to adequately ramp up infrastructure and technology to keep pace.

Notwithstanding the apparent ubiquity of telecom towers atop buildings in various cities, poor voice quality, blind spots and abrupt termination of calls have become such a bane in India’s telecom industry that Prime Minister Modi was forced to step in and ask officials to sort out the problem.

Consequently, the Supreme Court’s latest ruling has come as a surprise. True, the learned judges know the law better, but the common man fails to understand the logic how a caller is responsible for the call drop or for that matter a call disconnecting.

It is also difficult to understand why a caller would disconnect a call. For each such disconnection, a caller pays penal charges. In other words, his “folly”, if it is so, as per the ruling, enriches the operator.

The Apex Court asserted that TRAI’s ruling of imposing a penalty of Re 1 was illegal. Holding the telecom authority responsible for failing to explain the reasons for fixing a Re 1 compensation for each call drop and a cap on three call drops per day, the court stated the regulation is based on mere guess-work.

“These matters go out of mere guess work, and into the realm of unreasonableness, as obviously, as has been held by us, there was no intelligent care and deliberation before any of these parameters have been fixed,” it declared.

This may be so. In the whole debate however, one thing which has not been discussed is how much the callers are losing a day and what are the hefty earnings of the operators? The callers are unanimous that a Re 1 one compensation subject to a maximum or Rs 3 a day is the lowest one could have and is not on the higher side.

Undoubtedly, nobody disputes that a call drop itself is a penalty for a caller. It is also not unknown that it is not easy to fathom the intricacies of the problem to the last digit. The TRAI it appears had fixed the provisions at the minimum. As there is very little transparency on call drop data but it can be safely said that most companies have multiple sites where a call drop incidence is much above the stipulated 2 per cent ceiling.

Besides, a regulator primarily tries to protect the operation of a business. In this case too, TRAI had taken that caution by not prescribing a high penalty as that would have been detrimental to the interest of the industry.

Be that as it may, the regulator also has a responsibility to the user which it could not ignore. Indeed, for deficiencies of the services of the operator, the user/consumer cannot be penalized. Following this principle, TRAI had awarded the ruling imposing a minimum penalty on the operator.

Unfortunately, it is not unknown that the industry wants to thrive more on earnings which are not due to it. In the case of telecom, it is all the more blatant.

Clearly, call drops could be the undoing of several booming sectors, including India’s mobile-powered e-commerce industry, where frequent call drops make consumers nervous about payments. In fact, the problem has reached such dire proportions across the country that TRAI has indicated that telecom service providers need to compensate users for dropped calls.

As if to silence its critics, India’s top telecom company Bharti Airtel recently announced that it would bill by the second instead of per-minute. Another operator Telenor of Norway said it would reimburse users for call drops and commit to quality customer service. So TRAI’s observation has virtually been accepted by the industry in practice.

In sum, the judiciary needs to review its ruling. The issue is not about scoring a law point. It is about propriety and principles of natural justice. Getting redressal for a corporate ‘mistake’ is difficult.

Importantly, if the ruling on call drop becomes a precedent, it would cost the Indian consumers in all fields heavily and establish an unruly system, which the courts would find difficult to correct. Let the nation abide by TRAI’s observation and ensure justice to all. ----- INFA

(Copyright, India News and Feature Alliance)