Chennai: SMS being their only source of distant communication, the people with speech and hearing disabilities are agitating against the practice of telecom firms, including BSNL, charging extra for the text messages during festival times.
These ‘victims’ have planned to demonstrate outside BSNL offices all over the state on Wednesday (Jan. 8), according to state vice-president D. Lakshmanan of Taratdac (Tamil Nadu Association for the Rights of All Types of Differently Abled Persons and Care Givers).
He pointed out that the SMS had been the most effective and inexpensive medium of communication for thousands of hearing and speech impaired people.
“We learn from the hearing impaired persons that they must exchange as many as 20 SMSes to communicate one message which we would be able to accomplish by voice call in just one minute. And that means that during the festival times, these people are forced to spend a lot of money for even their routine communications on SMSes,” Lakshmanan told DC.
Another Taratdac member, P. Jhansi Rani argued that there is “absolutely no justification” for the BSNL to charge extra for SMS during festivals when the postal department handles huge extra load of delivering greeting cards and invitations without charging anything extra.
“Why does even public sector BSNL exploit people, that too the disabled, like this?” she wondered.
BSNL chief general manager A. Balasubramanian said, “We are only following Trai guidelines on tariff. The postal department is completely government whereas we are a PSU and cannot run losses.”
