Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has spent millions of rupees on advertisement in the national press stressing that all unauthorised mobile SIMs will be blocked after Tuesday (yesterday), but it has failed to protect the rights of legitimate mobile phone users, Pakistan Today has learnt.
A resident of Iqbal Town, Dr Zafar Iqbal Bhatti, told Pakistan Today that he had suffered a loss of around Rs 1 million owing to the malpractice of a franchise of a UAE-based mobile telecom operator. He claimed that a criminal secured his mobile phone SIM which was reissued from a telecom franchise in Rawalpindi without the display of original CNIC and physical presence of the subscriber.
He alleged that the action of the telecom company franchise in question cost him Rs 960,705 as the culprit used this SIM to reset his bank account ATM PIN code and access his account over an extended period of time. He said that he lodged a complaint with PTA (LHR/050511/W/17601), but he did not receive any response from the telecom watchdog.
However, after some days he got an email from the PTA’s Consumer Protection Directorate, Islamabad, which stated “This is to inform you that your complaint has been resolved.” Dr Bhatti said he neither got his money back nor was any action taken against the franchise that issued the SIM illegally. He questioned how the telecom regulator could claim that the issue had been resolved.
Speaking to Pakistan Today, a senior representative of a leading telecom company strongly criticised the PTA campaign to block unverified SIMs. He said it was merely eyewash and such cases would keep surfacing until the telecom regulator made decisions on merit. He indicated that the telecom watchdog had completed three phases of the campaign and spent millions of rupees on advertisements, but it never bothered to disclose the results of the exercise.
It was never revealed which telecom operator blocked how many connections. He pointed out that the PTA chairman took pride in the fact that the country had achieved 105 million cellular subscribers mark but beyond this had little concrete to show for its efforts. While expressing doubt over the whole exercise, he drew attention to the fact that PTA always launched these campaigns when political leaders raised questions on the performance of the telecom watchdog.
He pointed out that previously the unverified SIM blocking drive was launched when Senator Talha Mahmood raised concerns and now it was the turn of Interior Minister Rehman Malik. He underscored that last time PTA had indicated that some seven million unverified mobile SIMs had been blocked, but it impacted neither subscriber growth nor subscriber base.
