Background interviews with senior officials of the cellular companies and an initial assessment of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Interior suggested that the government’s campaign, launched a few months ago, to streamline cellular subscribers’ data and block unverified connections resulted in blocking of only 13 million connections that were not generating returns for the five major operators.
The situation also set alarms bells ringing in the quarters concerned, where officials find it hard to believe that despite blocking of nearly 13 million connections, there are still thousands of subscribers with complaints regarding hundreds of thousands of unverified SIMs.
“We have come to know that there are still hundreds of thousands of connections issued on CNICs (computerized national identity cards) of persons who never acquired those,” said Senator Talha Mahmood, the chairman of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Interior, which in August 2008 had issued directives to the cellular companies to streamline their subscribers’ data and block connections which had unverified consumer documents.
“It seems that the companies on our directives blocked mainly those connections which were inactive or not in use. This is a serious issue, and we would definitely look into it in coming days,” he said in a brief response to a Dawn query.
All the five major companies – Mobilink, Ufone, Telenor, Zong and Warid – following the standing committee’s directives claimed to have blocked a total of 12.9 million SIMs earlier this year. However, the recentlylaunched ‘SIM information system – 668’ introduced by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority surprised a large number of cellular phone subscribes, who found hundreds of thousands of SIMs registered under their CNICs.
A statement issued by the PTA last week said 175,000 complainants visited the different customer service centres of the mobile operators for their SIM data correction after the launch of the service while more than half a million SIMs had been removed from the complainants’ CNICs after they provided undertakings. The number is expected to grow at a much faster pace as another PTA statement said nearly 600 to 700 customers were being entertained at each service centre daily.
The telecom regulators argue that the previous campaign, which blocked nearly 13 million SIMs, addressed the “unverified data” while the recent initiative marked those connections which were not being used by the actual customers.
However, telecom experts, subscribers and consumer rights bodies are not convinced by the PTA’s line of reasoning and they have unanimously criticised the cellular companies, which they said caused inconvenience to their customers for their own faults.
Similarly, high-ups in the local police say the blocking of nearly 13 million SIMs have not helped the investigators who, during the course of several cases, continue to find themselves powerless to locate criminals since details submitted to cellphone service providers usually prove false.
“In almost all cases of kidnapping, we checked hundreds of cellphone numbers and followed the personal details of the people in whose names these connections were registered,” said Sharfuddin Memon, the chairman of the CitizensPolice Liaison Committee.
“We did not find the criminals, and neither could we guess about their whereabouts since the personal details with the cellular phone companies referred to innocent people who had not applied for the connections under suspicion and who enjoyed a separate and legitimate service. The previous exercise seems eyewash.” As the law-enforcers have yet to see benefits of the 13 million blocked SIMs, the consumer rights body appears un able to understand the reason behind the inconvenience caused to consumers under the newly-launched ‘facility’ by the PTA for the faulty system of the cellular companies.
“It’s such a bad example being set by the cellular companies and surprisingly under the supervision of the regulator, which is also supposed to protect consumers’ rights,” said Shaheen Mahmood, a member of the Consumer Rights Council, an 11-member Sindh government body meant to guard consumer rights.
She said that at the time when the cellular companies should have been penalised for their irresponsible and non-professional business designs just to increase the subscriber base, the regulator had made consumers pay the price.
Copyrights by Dawn newspaper 01/11/2009
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