The parliament was informed that the telecom ministry has fined Rs 2,923 crore on the telecom operators for discrepancies in adhering to mobile number issuance norms. This fine has been imposed over a period of the last 7 years. The new telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has stated that about 1.92 lakh connections were issued without proper norms being adhered to.

These connections were issued on forged or fake documents as per the telecom minister. The telecom minister stated that May, 2014 approximately 4.67 crore Customer Acquisition Forms had been audited by Telecom Enforcement Resource and Monitoring (TERM) cell and out of these, about 28 lakh were found to be non–compliant with the norms for issuing new connections.

The discrepancies which were found out were photo or document proof, subscriber’s acquisition based on forged or fake documents, pre-activated mobile connections, more than 9 connections to an individual in one service area so on and so forth. The TERM cell had detected about 550 illegal telecom operations as on May 31,2014 reports ET .

With the telecom ministry tightening the noose around the operators, they are bound to increase the strictness in issuing new connections.