So, you won’t getting any sort of compensation for the call drops you face due to your telecom operator. You just loose the money and start calling again.
In a pretty bad loss for the mobile users in India, the honorable Supreme Court of India has squashed the TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) regulation mandating telecom service providers to compensate on each and every subscriber for call drops.
The case benched by Justices Kurian Joseph and R F Nariman said: “We have held the impugned regulation to be ultra vires, arbitrary, unreasonable and non-transparent,”.
The Supreme Court has now passed a judgement in favour of the appeal filed by Cellular Operators Association of India, a body of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India and 21 telecom operators including the top telecom players Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, and Reliance. The appeal was challenging earlier judgement by the Delhi High Court upholding TRAI’s regulation.
The story starts with Indian telecom watchdog TRAI releasing an amendment where telecom operators need to compensate its customers by one rupee for each call drop limited to maximum three call drops a day. It had to be made effective from January 1, 2016.
But Indian telecom operators challenged this regulation in the lower court and all way up to Supreme Court. They say the entire telecom sector is under huge debt and have to pay a big price for spectrum license, therefore, zero tolerance on call drops should not be imposed on them. TRAI has earlier told the apex court that, the regulation was made to safeguard the interest of 100 crores+ subscribers as these telecom service providers are not willing to compensate them.
Finally, today, ending all debates the Supreme Court has ruled in favor the telecom operators and struck down the TRAI regulation.
Still one important question remains, who is responsible for the poor telecom service we get today? the Government or the telecom operators.