The talk of Department of telecom penalizing the Telcos for not following KYC norms or verification process has reached a new acme.
According to a report in Business Line : DoT has decided that operators will have to pay a penalty of Rs 50,000 per subscriber if they have more than 20 per cent of their user base without proper identity documents.
At present, operators pay only Rs 1,000 for every unverified mobile subscriber.
This is seen as a bid to address concerns raised by security agencies, and to further tighten the mobile subscriber verification norms.
Graded penalty system:
The operators would be liable to pay out more if they have a higher number of unverified subscribers.
So If a Telco has such percentage of unverified subscribers in a particular circle:
5% :penalty Rs.1000/subscriber.
5-10% :penalty Rs.5000/subscriber.
10-20%:penalty Rs.20000/subscriber.
<20%:penalty Rs.50000/subscriber.
This would further be followed by random checks every month by DoT’s vigilance officers to determine the extent of violation by the operators.
@hat does this mean to telcos:
In an environment where Indian telcos are adding more than 10 million subscribers a month this comes as a big jolt because these companies would eventually find it unmanageable to handle verification process for such a large numbe. Even if they go for outsourcing it would cost them very dearly and would definitely increase the cost of acquiring subscribers.
In the meantime it could come as a boon for many companies involved into verification processes and even for small BPO units because Telcos will definitely try to obey the new rules in order to avoid paying heavy penalties.
DoT seems to be doing the right thing by imposing hefty fines because these companies if they wanted could have obeyed the law by outsourcing verification process but they didn’t do it as they feared losing a lot of subscribers if they go for verification as those customers may not even be holding valid papers to obtain mobile connection.
