About 850 million mobile customers thought September 27, 2011 would be their D-day to get rid of pesky SMSes. For, that was the day when the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) finally came out with its revised set of rules barring unsolicited calls and SMSes. But even after four months, there seems to be little let-up from nuisance calls and messages for most mobile users in the country.
As per TRAI data, an urban mobile user receives approximately four marketing or promotional messages in a day on his device. And to curb these, the regulatory body came up with its exercise of do not disturb (DND) registry, later renamed as national customer preference register (NCPR), where a customer can register to avoid being harassed by telemarketers.
Though telecom operators have also started penalising telemarketing firms for violating guidelines, they blame the government for improper implementation of the registry.
“There are good security systems in place with us but the DND registry till date has not been successfully implemented leading to pesky SMSes,” says a spokesperson of Vodafone. “More messages are generated from abroad which is causing confusion and results in loss for operators,” he claims.
Despite new regulations to penalise violators up to Rs 2.5 lakh, there is little control over bulk SMSes from abroad through the web, says an Aircel official.Acknowledging this fact, even telecom minister Kapil Sibal, at a recent meeting, said the government had no control over SMSes coming via the Internet as the servers were situated abroad.
However, taking cognisance of the situation, TRAI, in its latest fiat on January 20, 2012, has come out with a new set of instructions to all access providers and the international long-distance operators that bars delivery of SMSes with alphanumeric headers, SMS with similar signatures, etc. “We hope this would strengthen the framework for addressing unsolicited commercial communications,” said a TRAI official.
Dis-service to users
The automatic subscription mechanism of mobile service providers has been putting customers in trouble as they are forced to pay for a service they had not sought, which is criticised as “unfair” and “unethical” practice adopted by the service providers to make a fast buck.
The SMSes are sent offering a variety of services like cricket score, beauty tips, caller tune downloads or horoscope. The SMS will state that the person has subscribed to this service, and if they want to unsubscribe, they have to send an SMS to the service provider.
“After the expiry date, the service provider will send another message for renewal stating that it will be valid for the next 30 days, without the consent of the customers.
Many people are cheated by mobile service providers who earn crores of rupees on such ‘forced’ service on consumers, which is unethical, unfair and illegal,” Mr K. Kathirmathiyon, secretary of Coimbatore consumer cause (CCC), told Deccan Chronicle.
The CCC has registered a complaint with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) requesting it to make it mandatory that any service should be provided only on a specific request by mail/SMS from the number and not by any other method.
“We have noted that they set a song for ringtone without the consent of the customers and collect monthly rentals,” he pointed out, and claimed that some ‘unsubscribe’ messages do not reach the service provid-ers.
According to him, the mobile operators clai-med that if the customers did not unsubscribe, it would be taken as consent for subscription, which was unethical.
In the process, poor people get hit as they are unaware of the deduction by the service providers. Only a few educated fight with the service providers to cancel the subscription and get the refund.
“It is evident that unethical practices are being followed from the fact that the companies immediately refund the money when we question them,” he said.
When contacted, Mr V. Raghunandan, deput-y D-G of telecom enforcement, resource and monitoring (TERM) cell (Tamil Nadu), department of telecommunications, said there were such methods in practice among service providers and they were ready to take action on customers’ complaints. “The aggrieved customers can lodge a complaint with us and we will look into the matter,” Mr Raghunandan promised.
