The Delhi High Court on Tuesday expressed displeasure at the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) failing to take action against unregistered telemarketers engaged in unsolicited commercial communications (UCC).
A Bench of Chief Justice D.N. Patel and Justice Prateek Jalan asked the telecom regulator why it had not taken any action against anybody till now. “Take action against some persons, so that the remaining persons will fall in line”, it said.
The Bench raised serious objection to the TRAI counsel taking to the court to define various regulations instead of showing the actual progress of the action taken against unregistered telemarketers.
Show-cause notice
When counsel argued that show-cause notice had been issued to various individuals and entities, the Bench shot back saying, “Show-cause notice is not an action. It is the process of taking action. Show us the progress that you have taken action against 10 persons”.
It cautioned, “There is a wrong notion in your [TRAI] mind that a show-cause notice is an action. We will impose cost upon you for every adjournment”.
The court was hearing Paytm’s petition, which claimed that telecom operators were not blocking those defrauding its customers by “phishing” activities over various mobile networks.
Senior advocate Dushyant Dave, for Paytm, had claimed that due to a large number of unregistered players, Paytm was experiencing fraud of its customers to the tune of ₹1-2 crore each month.
Mr. Dave said there must be some time-line attached to the TRAI notices so that there was progress of the action taken against unregistered telemarketers.
‘Header’ issue
The TRAI counsel said that as on September 18, 2020 more than 1.62 lakh ‘header’ have been registered for the purpose of sending commercial communications.
‘Header’ is an alpha-numeric string of maximum 11 characters or numbers assigned to an individual, business or legal entity to send commercial communications under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preferences Regulations (TCCCPR).
On the Bench asking, how many “header” are floating around in the system at the moment, the TRAI said that under the previous regime, there used to be 9 lakh that could be attributed to duplication, active and inactive ones.
The Bench remarked, “Nobody is saying that you are to investigate a fraud like a police. But then, you would want to have a telecom architecture that makes it difficult for persons to commit fraudulent transactions”.
The court directed the TRAI to show the progress of the action taken by next date of hearing.