Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Thursday said he would personally go out and conduct a ‘test drive’ to monitor the ‘menace’. To begin with, he, along with the Telecom Secretary and BSNL Chairman and Managing Director, will conduct a ‘test drive’ in Delhi.

Though telecom companies, such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular, claim an improvement in call drops, many customers say they continue to face the problem.

The sector regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had come out with a regulation mandating operators to compensate consumers for call drops by paying ₹1 for each call dropped with a maximum of ₹3/day per customer. However, because of pleas filed by telecom operators, the matter is in Delhi High Court, which has reserved its order till April 25.

“I, JS Deepak (Telecom Secretary) and Anupam Srivastava (BSNL CMD) will go around in Delhi to monitor call drops,” Prasad said at a BSNL event here, without spelling out further details.

TRAI also conducts the test drives to check on call drops. In its tests in December-January, the regulator had found most operators failing in the quality of their networks. Prasad said if he was taking initiatives to work on ground, he would even like top BSNL officials to come out of their offices and work on the ground level. The Minister had earlier conducted ‘test drives’ in Indore with Srivastava.

The Minister also asked BSNL to work harder to expand its customer base, adding that he himself was ready to ‘sit and sell SIMs for BSNL’ along with officials.

“Around April, BSNL was selling seven-eight lakh SIMs and in January-March (this year), BSNL started selling 20 lakh SIMs. I am told BSNL has 70 lakh customers. I would like to see this customer base to grow one crore net in 2016-17,” Prasad added.

PTI reports: Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Thursday asked the TRAI to consider the papers dealing with technical aspects of call drops and apprise it of its stand on whether it could consider amending regulations to impose penalty on telecom firms.

“Factually, it appears that nobody has seen technical papers on the day of (framing of) regulation. Please take into account the technical paper and tell us in affidavit whether you consider amending the regulations or you still want to stand by it. Whatever you have to say, tell us with reasons,” the bench headed by Justice Kurian Joseph said.

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