The Department of Telecom has rejected a request for hearing from Bharti Airtel on the Rs 650-crore penalty being imposed on the company for alleged violation of national long distance telephone licence.
Bharti Airtel’s new Chief Executive Officer Gopal Vittal had sought Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal’s intervention on the issue saying that the company had not been given a hearing before the DoT decided on imposing the fine.
“The regulator found this service to be customer friendly and in compliance to the licence conditions. While our service had passed the test of the regulator, the DoT is reportedly likely to impose penalty on us without any opportunity of personal hearing,” Airtel CEO had said.
According to internal DoT note seen by
“The company has already been given an opportunity to present its case in 2008,” said a senior DoT officer.
The case dates back to 2003 when Airtel was found to be offering its customers a service called Subscriber Local Dialling.
Under this service, a subscriber would be able to get all calls as a local call while roaming.
For example, if a Delhi subscriber travelled to Mumbai, he would be able to get incoming calls from Mumbai contacts as a local call.
According to the DoT, such a call should have been routed to Delhi first on the national long distance network and then brought back to Mumbai.
By routing the call in Mumbai itself, Airtel has bypassed the long distance network which is against the licence conditions, the DoT said in an internal note.
According to the Department, this caused revenue loss to the Government in the form of lower licence fee from the long distance operations.
Vittal said that there has been no communication from DoT on this case for over eight years and therefore the company would face a huge handicap if the penalty was imposed at this stage.
“As a result of delay we are likely to be seriously affected in our ability to produce or lead evidence which may also be no longer in existence to establish our case,” the letter to Sibal said.