Terrorised by telemarketers?

In August 2010, Finance Minister and UP's chief troubleshooter Pranab Mukherjee was in the middle of a highly sensitive meeting with opposition leaders in an effort to break a logjam in the Parliament. Right in the middle of this meeting, Mukherjee's phone rang and expecting it to be an urgent call, he answered his phone. But within seconds he furiously disconnected the call. When BJP leader Sushma Swaraj enquired about the caller, the veteran Congress leader revealed that it was a telemarketer offering a home loan.

Ever since this incident the Telecom Ministry and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India have been in a tizzy forming regulations to put a stop to unwanted telemarketing messages. But every time a regulation is put in place, telemarketing firms find a way to circumvent the system.

A way around

It started with the Do Not Call registry which turned out to be a complete failure as most of the telemarketers refused to get themselves registered with the Department of Telecom neither did they scrub numbers with the registry before calling. Telemarketers now send SMSes in the guise of commercial messages (like the updates sent by your bank, travel agent or service provider) since this category does not come under the purview of regulations. The policy has therefore been tweaked and re-tweaked a number of times over the past few years in a bid to plug all the gaps.

But the end result of all this is that unwanted calls and SMSes continue to be an inconvenience for all mobile phone users. The regulations have failed primarily because everyone involved in this, except the consumer, are all making money out of it and hence do not have any motivation to stop the menace. The operators make money from selling airtime and SMS on wholesale rates to telemarketing firms. The telemarketing firms are happy to spam your phones because even if one of the 50 messages they send result in a business transaction they make much more than their investment.

Globally too, regulators are struggling to break this nexus but have had limited success. One big reason for this is the availability of alternate technologies that enable telemarketers to override regulations. For instance, when the TRAI introduced the ‘100 SMSes per day' cap in an attempt to put a squeeze on spam messages, telemarketers started routing the SMS through international gateways. The SMSes are sent through overseas operators who do not come under TRAI's purview and, therefore, there is no fear of being blacklisted or penalised. The cost of routing the SMSes, at 6-7 paise for a message, through a foreign operator is roughly the same as what it costs to send them on an Indian operator's network.

As a result, pesky SMSes have made a comeback over the past few weeks after the initial lull, when TRAI had notified the new rules

Compensation scheme

Therefore, the best way to deal with this menace is to have a compensation scheme for the harassed consumers. The existing regulations do provide for imposing a fine on telemarketing calls but most telemarketers get away in India because a majority of consumers do not register a complaint against them. The telemarketers know this and therefore do not hesitate before calling a subscriber. Even if a customer complains, the penalty amount is collected and kept in Government coffers. The consumer gets absolutely nothing for being disturbed during that important meeting, nor does he get any reward for reporting the call.

In countries like the USA, mobile users can claim up to $1,500 if they get an unsolicited telemarketing call. Indian authorities should also adopt such compensation schemes whereby consumers should be given Rs 500 every time they get an unwanted calls or SMS. This will incentivise the consumers to report unwanted calls apart from scaring away agents from calling without scrubbing the Do Not Call registry.

Another way of compensating users is to offer them a price per minute value for listening to telemarketing calls. A paper presented by professors at Yale Law School argues that such a “name your own price" mechanism could be easily implemented technologically by crediting consumers' phone bills or pre-paid cards. This system gives the consumer the option to authorise intermediaries to connect calls that meet their compensation demand.

Giving consumers the right to be compensated may also benefit some telemarketers. Once consumers can opt to receive these calls in return for compensation it becomes possible to deregulate the telemarketers, lifting current restrictions.

thomas@thehindu.co.in

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