Within days of getting a rap on its knuckles, Airtel offered to return Rs 190 crore subsidy that had flown into the ‘unsolicited’ Payments Bank accounts of its 31 lakh mobile phone subscribers, sources said on Monday.
Airtel wrote to National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Monday promising to return Rs 190 crore (along with interest) to the consumers’ original bank accounts that were linked to the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), the sources familiar with the development told PTI.
NPCI is an umbrella organisation for all retail payments in India. Both Airtel and Airtel Payments bank came under fire after Airtel allegedly opened accounts of its mobile phone subscribers without seeking their ‘informed consent’, and LPG subsidy worth crores was being deposited to these accounts. The Government acted swiftly in the matter and the Unique Identification Authority of India, late last week, temporarily barred the company from conducting Aadhaar-based SIM verification of mobile customers using eKYC process and e-KYC of payments bank clients.
Suspending the ‘e-KYC licence key’, the Aadhaar issuing body UIDAI also ordered PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct an audit of Bharti Airtel and Airtel Payments Bank to ascertain if their systems and processes are in compliance with the Aadhaar Act.
“The Government has taken a stern view of the entire issue and Airtel has been forced to return the amount to original bank account of these customers,” said a Government source who did not wish to be named. The mechanism of the DBT benefits floating into the accounts is also being tightened, to bring in greater accountability, he noted. Mounting pressure on Airtel, the state-run oil companies had begun writing to the billionaire Sunil Mittal-led firm asking it to transfer back the LPG subsidy that got credited to its payment bank accounts.
The subsidy that Government pays to households for buying cooking gas LPG has got credited to these payments bank accounts, leading to inconvenience to users many of whom did not know that their entitlement was not coming to their regular bank account but going an account which they had not applied for.