Relief for Airtel, Voda Idea: How DoT panel saved bleeding telcos

An internal committee of the department of telecommunications has rejected the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (Trai) 2016 recommendation to levy an aggregate penalty of Rs 3,050 crore on Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular for denying interconnection to Reliance Jio Infocomm leading to inconvenience to the latter’s consumers as a large number of call attempts resulted in failures.

Sources told FE that four members of the seven-member committee have rejected Trai’s proposal to levy penalty, while three have endorsed the penal measure. A final decision on the committee’s report could not be taken by the telecom commission on Thursday as all its members were not present for the meeting.