TRAI has also proposed to cut down the time taken by the Donor Operator to give a clearance to a porting request

To ensure that users are able to port their mobile numbers easily and in a timely manner, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Tuesday proposed financial disincentives of up to ₹ 10,000 for service providers for wrongful rejections of such requests.

In the draft guidelines on Mobile Number Portability (MNP), the regulator has also proposed to cut down the time taken by the Donor Operator to give a clearance to a porting request within the same circle to two days from four days at present. The will “drastically” reduce the porting time of seven days for subscribers.

However, for inter-circle MNP requests, the current timeline of four working days for clearance by Donor Operators will continue.

“In order to discourage the wrongful rejections of the porting requests and adherence to the timelines specified for the various tasks, the provisions of financial disincentives have been made,” the telecom regulator said.

It added, “…it is important that wrongful rejections and providing false/wrongful information by donor operator… are to be discouraged. Therefore, in order to protect the interest of mobile subscribers, such contraventions of regulations shall be subject to scrutiny and the imposition of the financial disincentives, if applicable.”

Industry body Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), however, said that penalties are extremely blunt instruments to ensure compliance while calling for a partnered approach with TRAI to ensure goals are met and difficulties ironed out.

“We believe MNP demand has peaked after the closure of Aircel, Telenor and RCom and the heavy demand from customers of these companies to move to other operators. Present operators wish to ensure customers are not inconvenienced during the MNP process and hence are working to put the appropriate systems and infrastructure in place to comply,” it added.

“….If any access provider contravenes the provisions of regulation 6A and regulation 12, be liable to pay an amount not exceeding ₹ 10,000 for each wrongful rejection of the request for porting,” TRAI said. For violation of some of the other norms, a penalty of ₹ 5,000 has been proposed.

However, the regulator added that it will not order payment of any amount as financial disincentive unless the service provider has been given a reasonable opportunity of representing against the contravention of the regulation.