The Delhi High Court today passed strictures on Reliance Infocomm for depriving BSNL of over Rs 200 crore by passing off international calls from the US as domestic traffic.Ironically, Reliance Infocomm got rapped on its own petition. Justice Vikramjit Sen declined to restrain BSNL from carrying out its threat of not connecting any of the calls originating from the private operator’s network unless it clears its arrears by tomorrow.Some of the observations made by Justice Sen are:• ‘‘A reading of the Agreement prima facie leads to the conclusion that Reliance Infocomm has surreptitiously breached the covenants and obligations contained in the Interconnect Agreement with the purpose of withholding monies which appear to be due to BSNL.• ‘‘Prima facie it is evident that the manner in which Reliance Infocomm has conducted its business activities is in dishonest breach of the Interconnect Agreement. Such a party is not entitled to any discretionary relief.’’The dispute is over whether a home country direct service (HCDS) launched five months ago by Reliance in the US should be treated no differently than any international long distance service (ILDS).For any ILDS call terminating in its network, BSNL is entitled to an ‘‘access deficit charge’’ ranging from Rs 4.40 to Rs 5.00 per minute. But Reliance has been paying BSNL the local call charge of only 30 paise per minute for its HCDS calls from the US.The High Court today held that it was ‘‘not in dispute that by changing an international call to a domestic one, the liability of Reliance Infocomm towards BSNL has been drastically reduced.’’ BSNL alleged that Reliance Infocomm had made incoming international calls look like local calls by tampering with what is known as ‘‘caller line identification.’’ The court said: ‘‘Assuming that Reliance was within its contractual rights to use the Home Country Direct Service even for telephonic traffic of third parties, there would scarcely have been any need to change the caller identification unless it had itself understood its business activity to be contrary to the Interconnect Agreement.’’The High Court also rejected the Reliance claim that it was not liable to pay BSNL more than Rs 54 crore it had remitted last month.
