The Hindu : New Delhi News : Government issues fresh notices in illegal call racket case

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Dec 04, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Government issues fresh notices in illegal call racket case

By Sandeep Dikshit

NEW DELHI, DEC. 3. The Government has issued fresh notices to 16 licensed telecom service providers, including Reliance, for allegedly abetting the illegal international call racket that has caused a huge loss to the Central exchequer.

Meanwhile, stepped-up monitoring has busted more illegal exchanges after the public responded to the Government's appeal to report international calls that figure as local calls on the caller line identification (CLI) on phones.

The Government will continue to keep an eye on monitor these companies and plans to ask them to deposit higher bank guarantees in case the for repeated offence. is repeated. "If they prove to be incorrigible, we can question their licence," a senior official of the Department of Telecom (DoT) official told The Hindu .

The fresh notices were issued after the tribunal for telecom related disputes told the DoT that the principle of natural justice was not followed by denying companies the opportunity to explain their position. The DoT had earlier imposed penalties ranging from Rs.10 lakhs to Rs. 2.34 crores on seven companies — Spectranet, Dishnet, Primenet Global, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, Primus, Trakonline and Vertec. Eight other companies, against whom investigations are in progress, have also been issued fresh show cause notices. They are HFCL Infotel, Wipro, SAB Info, Trident, Shivam Datatec, Sigma Online, Magna Corp and Capital Online.

Reliance was separately fined Rs. 150 crores by the DoT in addition to the Rs. 167 crores it has paid to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) — as against the total demand of Rs. 600 crores — for violating licence conditions. Giving this information, a senior DoT officer said the lapse by Reliance was "definitely a major institutional failure."

Reliance had allegedly disguised international calls as local calls while passing them over to BSNL and MTNL. In the process, it avoided paying higher charges for international calls.

The decision to charge private phone services and Internet companies, even though the when offences committed have been were committed by their subscribers, follows a recent change in policy recently.

Under this, the notional loss is assessed and the service provider is also charged with the offence. The Government now tends to view the offence "more seriously" if the offices of the service provider and the offender are on the same premises.

The Government also claimed it had more successes success in its detection after it set up mobile vigilance units located in Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai and publicised toll-free numbers for the public to provide tip-offs about provide information about the masking of illegal international calls. Three more illegal exchanges — two in Delhi and one in Nagpur — have been detected and busted with the help of the local police. The reason attributed to the fast detection is the providing of toll free numbers — 1600-110-420 or 011-2373-1100 — for the general public. to pass on the information about the grey international calls.

In Delhi one such call helped bust a racket in Nehru Place. A search of the premises of Net Serve allegedly uncovered equipment meant for routing illegal international calls. Eight telephone lines of TouchTel (Bharti Telecom) and three Lines of Tata Indicom were found connected to the illegal set-up. Another raid at Nagpur found that Sidpro Info had obtained 24 phone lines and a leased line from Reliance. These lines were misused for routing illegal international calls and the company was distributing these calls to subscribers through out the country.

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