Rs 3 per day compensation isn’t the best way to tackle the Call Drops issue

Call drops have been a pending menace faced by cellular consumers in India. In June this year, Union Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad asked mobile operators to walk the extra mile to curb the problem of call drops.

After a series of discussions with the cellular operators, telecom operators began taking steps to curb the problem of call drops by coming together and taking steps such as adopting in-building solutions, increase the number of cell sites installed as well as augmenting the number of radio frequency resources.

Over the past few months, there have been directives issued by the government, or its representatives including the Union Telecom Minister, or the industry regulator TRAI to push for recommendations on the compensation for call drops.

Finally, when compensation was announced, it was a measly Re 1 per call dropped, limited to a maximum of three calls per day. So despite charging for dropped calls, cellular mobile customers are entitled to a maximum of Rs 3 per day as compensation for dropped calls.

What’s surprising though, is that there’s an added catch within the specified compensation of Rs 3 per day! According to TRAI, telecom operators from whose network the call originated will have to compensate its customer if the call gets disconnected because of fault in its network. In contrast, the receiving customer isn’t entitled to compensation.

In response to the issue of call drops, telecom operators have blamed high spectrum and licencing costs, changes in spectrum holdings, and the need for heavy investments for 3G and 4G services as the problems faced by the industry. Regarding call drops specifically, the industry blames the overload caused by tower that are not operational, and the difficulty in operationalising new sites.

We wonder when the investments in to network infrastructure would be set into motion, so that the problem of call drops is dealt with at the root cause, rather than a fall back means of solving it by offering measly compensation of a rupee for three calls a day!