Aircel has been caught up in the loop of legalities for all the wrong reasons lately. As the news is out in its grandest way possible, after Aircel filed for bankruptcy on February 28, 2018, under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy code in National Company Law Tribunal, a direction was sent to Aircel a fortnight later urging the telco to work while complying with the guidelines set for quality performance and customer service. Aircel being neck-deep in trouble from all sides and laden with issues of finances had apparently been keeping aside performance parameters as a result of which Department of Telecom found huge loopholes in the working of the company.
All these recent developments were revealed in response to the questions which were sent to the Parliament on Wednesday, where questions were posed concerning the said carrier.
Minister Manoj Sinha, in a written reply to the Lok Sabha, had the following to say about this new unrest regarding Aircel. “Keeping in view that there has been a large-scale deterioration of the services, DoT has issued a direction to Aircel on 19.03.2018 for compliance of various clauses of the agreement including those relating to customer services and quality of performance.”
What tipped off the DoT to take this step against Aircel was the fact that during the radiation audit conducted by DoT it was revealed that most of the carrier’s towers were switched off, thus resulting in non-generation of porting code and also this was the reason for many problems on the customers’ part.
Also, the statement from government has lashed on the company’s financials as they have asked Axis Bank to invoke Rs. 411 crores worth of guarantees since the telecom company in question previously had not informed the department before going on to file bankruptcy.
As Industry Experts would have it, it is being said that the reason for the telco’s woes is the competitive and predatory pricing by Reliance Jio which has caused huge unrest in the Industry financials and also led to declining revenues for a lot of other telecom giants.
