The Comptroller & Auditor General of India has questioned the credibility of telecom regulator’s assessment of mobile companies meeting quality of services norms.
According to a report prepared by the Director General (Audit), Post & Telecommunications, some of the telecom companies were repeatedly not meeting the quality of service benchmarks.
The DG (Audit) has concluded that the process followed for audit and assessment of quality of service by the telecom regulator was hardly an assurance that the service providers were providing good quality service and meeting all benchmarks in the entire service areas at all times on all days.
At present, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India monitors the quality of service parameters through private agencies.
Benchmarks
The TRAI has laid out specific benchmarks related to various aspects of telecom services, including billing and consumer care. For example, the TRAI has stipulated that call drop rate should be less than two per cent at any given point of time.
In a report sent to the Department of Telecom, the DG (Audit) has pointed out that operators were constantly demanding additional spectrum for meeting the quality of service norms when spectrum was being given on subscriber-linked criteria but they declined to take part in the auction recently.
“He has given examples where the same licensees are now catering for several times subscribers than the standard provided in the subscriber-linked criteria with the available spectrum,” said an internal DoT note.
For example, an operator in Delhi is catering to 91 lakh subscribers with 10 MHz spectrum while another player is providing services to just 26 lakh customers with 12.4 MHz spectrum.
According to the CAG, this can be possible only if the operators are compromising on quality of service or inferior quality of survey done by the agencies selected by the TRAI.
cartelisation
According to the DG (Audit), apparent cartelisation by the telecom service providers observed recently in the last two spectrum auctions, aided by the inaction of the DoT and the TRAI to enforce quality of service norms.
“It has already cost the Government very dearly as huge amount of spectrum, valued at tens of thousands of crores, available in the country for cellular mobile service are being rendered waste while the Government is starved of its dies resources,” the DoT note, quoting the CAG observations, said adding that this has emboldened mobile operators to demand further reduction in the base price.
The audit report could deter the Government to further cut the reserve price for next round of spectrum auction.
The CAG has advised that the existing parameters fixed by TRAI for monitoring quality of service need a thorough revisit so that it reflects the actual position.