News Title : Telcos must complete SIM verification by Apr: Tarana

News Date : 2015-10-12

- Business
The mobile phone operators have to complete the SIM registration verification by April next year as majority of the work will be finished by that time, said state minister for telecom Tarana Halim. The mobile companies at press briefing earlier this month said there should not be a timeframe for the SIM verification work as it was a continuous process. ‘The verification cannot continue forever as our main target is to identify and terminate illegal SIMs. It should be completed by April. I wanted to finish it by March but just kept an extra month in hand in case of any situation,’ she told New Age on Saturday. Tarana said the ministry had already sent letters to the mobile phone companies specifying the timeframe. ‘As biometric verification will officially begin from December 1, the operators don’t need to send data for bulk verification after that. During January-March we will recheck the subscriber data before and after 2012 and will send SMSs for faulty registrations,’ she said. When asked about whether the mobile number portability implementation can be delayed because of the SIM registration verification, Tarana said, ‘I don’t think so. We are planning the MNP launch in February-March period and hopefully everything will come to a shape by that time.’ After the initial verification of one lakh mobile SIM verification with the Election Commission’s national identity database it was found that 75 per cent of the SIM cards have faulty registration. Cases have found that that 14,000 SIM cards were registered under one NID and 11,000 with anther NID. The mobile operators have already received green signal from the EC for signing agreement to get access in the EC database. Currently, there are more than 13 crore mobile phone users in the country. As per a regulatory order in 2012, the mobile companies were supposed to activate a SIM card only after confirming the subscriber’s identity but because of the lack of NID access the operators could not verify the information during a SIM registration. The law enforcement agencies on various occasions requested the BTRC to streamline the SIM registration process to stop crimes using fake SIMs.

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