Now that the government has extended the lockdown period till May 3, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, TRAI wants the three private telecom operators to extend the validity period of their prepaid connections, reports Economic Times.
Incidentally, the telecom operators are also not operating their stores to their full capacity. The stores are either shut completely or operating with very thin presence of staff. Online payment is the only way the customers can make payments and recharge their packs. Not everyone has this capability to make online payments. In view of this, now the TRAI says the validity of prepaid connections expiring between now and May 3 should be extended till May 4.
While Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel were quite prompt with their announcements immediately after the government declared the 21-day lockdown, there has been no communication from them yet.
For the telecom operators this would mean a direct loss and they have already made a request that the government compensate them using the USO Fund that has been created and for which collections have already been made. It remains to be seen if the DoT will agree to this.
The last set of concessions announced by the telecom operators last time round was extension of the validity of the prepaid packs up till April 17 by Airtel and Vodafone Idea. But this was only for the lower rung 180 million customers. Reliance Jio too had extended till April 17 and offered additional minutes for voice calls and 100 additional text messages. Some 90 million of Jio’s customers benefitted.
TRAI has also sent out a letter to each of the operators, including BSNL and MTNL asked them to provide details of the number of customers whose prepaid connections expired during the first 21-day lockdown and how many did not get the recharge done.