Thursday, March 20, 2008

TRAI'n reforms

Telecom Regulator TRAI has taken a good step announcing to impose heavy penalties on telecom operators for unsolicited calls.
The DoT has also suggested a Do Call Registry (DCR) instead of the present Do not Call Registry (DNC) which, if implemented well, could benefit millions of telecom subscribers.

While the service providers are the mains culprits, the banks are no lesser evils either. Whenever we register for mobile banking or just give our mobile number to the bank as a contact detail, it then immediately gets circulated among the telemarketers who work for all the major banks. No sooner did I register for Citibank last year than a telemarketer offered me a personal loan from Deutsche Bank.

The same is the case with credit cards. Whenever you apply for a credit card of one bank, all the banks (through telemarketers) will line up to you to offer their credit cards; golds, platinums and so on.

There are few mobile applications that could be used to buy movie tickets, train tickets etc. The first thing they ask is your mobile number; and once we fall into their traps, we are bombarded with ads that are rarely relevant, or our numbers are shared with (or sold to) the telemarketing agencies.

TRAI should consider making it mandatory for all the companies, which distribute these kinds of application, and banks not to share the mobile numbers of customers to any other company, and this should be strictly monitored by the telecom watchdogs.

So in addition to the telecom operators, TRAI should also penalize Banks, Telemarketers, and all those who share or sell our mobile numbers to other agencies.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

How about making it mandatory only for the tele-marketers to follow the DND list. In case they fail to do so, TRAI should impose a penalty on them. That way tele-marketers would stop accepting numbers which are one DND list, from their clients.