Keeping in view the wrongful rejections of porting requests by access providers and the deviations in adhering to the timelines prescribed in the MNP regulations, the sector regulator Trai has proposed a penalty of Rs 10,000 on telecom operators.

“In the cases where contravention is established in rejection of porting request for an Access Provider acting as donor operator, a financial disincentive of an amount of  Rs.10,000 will be levied  for each rejection”, it said in a statement.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had issued the Telecommunication Mobile Number Portability Regulations, 2009 (8 of 2009) dated 23 rd September, 2009 laying down the basic business process framework for implementation of mobile number portability in the country.

After implementation of the MNP Regulations, the Authority had received a number of complaints wherein the subscribers have reported that their porting request have been rejected by the donor operators on frivolous reasons.

In order to ascertain whether the porting requests are being rejected correctly and as per the provisions of regulation 12 of the regulations, the Authority sought supporting documents from the concerned Access Providers who have rejected porting requests under categories such as ‘UPC mis-match’, ‘contractual obligation’, ‘less than 90 days from the date of activation of new connection’ and ‘outstanding payment due’.

In a number of cases, the Authority noted that the Access Provider, acting as Donor  Operator, could not furnish satisfactory evidence to establish that the rejection of the porting requests of the subscribers done by them were in accordance with the regulation 12.

At the end of June 2012, over 54 million subscribers have requested to change their service providers using this facility.