Tariff Sibal vs Prasad

There is a significant difference between the functioning of UPA-2 and NDA governments. Soon after taking over the charge of telecom ministry from A Raja in 2010, Kapil Sibal started making statements encouraging operators to raise tariff. On December 9, 2010 this was reported in The Economic Times and on December 11, 2010 it was published as a front-page story in Business Standard.

During Mr Sibal’s tenure, the operators had a free hand and kept raising the tariff. Through tricks such as reducing the validity of tariff vouchers, playing with the pulse rates for charging, etc, they manipulated the hikes (see the example of Idea Cellular at pg 26 & 27). By lobbying with Rahul Khullar led Trai, they levied termination charges on SMS. This led to SMS tariff hike by over 12 times and many utilities stopped providing SMS based services. For example, traffic cops stopped providing updates traffic updates (see news clippings). Banks started charging for providing SMS based alerts, which were free earlier. Schools stopped sending alerts for the parents of students. Many consumer organizations represented against such tariff hikes, but it all fell on deaf ears.