TRAI disconnects more than 10,000 telemarketers’ phones

New Delhi: Telecom regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, (TRAI) has disconnected 10,051 telephones of telemarketers for repeatedly violating the 'National Do Not Call Registry' (NDNC) a database of telephone numbers of subscribers who do not want to receive unsolicited commercial calls, that was operationalised on 12 October 2007.
 
A TRAI statement said that so far 10,151 telephones of telemarketers had been disconnected on account of repeated violation of the regulation on the subject. Out of these, 8,602 disconnections were of those telemarketers who were not registered with the DoT.

Another 2,801 telemarketers have been fined Rs 1,000 for violation of NDNC rules, while 8,543 were fined Rs500. Analysts say that the penalty should be tougher for the regulation to be taken more seriously.

Around 19,163 telemarketers are registered with the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).

TRAI has been heavily criticised over the NDNC being ineffective. While TRAI has admitted that even the 18 million registered subscribers continue to get telemarketing calls, it claims that there has been a significant reduction in the number of such calls.

''At present efforts are being made by TRAI and other stakeholders to achieve near zero tolerance in handling the non-compliant telemarketers," the regulator said in a statement.

TRAI has said that in the past six months around 81,000 complaints were received by various service providers, out of which more than 79,000 complaints have been addressed.

Considering that more than 18 million subscribers are registered, these complaints constitute about 0.44 per cent of the total registered subscribers.
TRAI has also issued preliminary show cause notices to various service providers for not taking action against errant telemarketers.

The NDNC was set up last year after consumers complained that they were getting unsolicited calls from marketing companies, which was impinging on their privacy.
Significantly 40 per cent of the registered subscribers are in urban areas like Delhi and Mumbai and also in states like Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa.

Industry sources  say that there is a lack of awareness about NDNC in the country and apart from marketers telecom operators are also not keen to promote NDNC in a big way.

TRAI says it is confident that NDNC will be more successful in the future. It claims that complaints of non-compliance were received from only 0.44 per cent of the total registered subscribers.