Public telcos receive majority of service complaints

Deora said in his written reply that there were 1,392 reports against Bharti Airtel,1,814 against Reliance Communications and 814 against Vodafone. The three operators are the countrys largest by subscriber numbers.

The major reasons for non-compliance are inadequate infrastructure to support the traffic,electricity problem,optical fibre cut,local problems and sudden increase in traffic, he said.

The state-run companies have struggled with mounting losses and are trying to absorb over 1,000 civil servants into their senior management.

BSNL had 1,400 officers from the Indian Telecom Service while MTNL had another 200,many of whom were anxious about the companys finances. BSNL suffered a loss after tax of Rs 6,384 crore in the twelve months to March 31. Officers who approached the courts and where the courts,as per records obtainable in the DoT,have been granted interim stay or given interim directions have been asked to continue in BSNL and MTNL, he said.

But the telecom secretary,R Chandrashekhar,said the large number of service-related complaints were not linked with the absorption problem.

However,the figures from the government differed from data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India for the three months to June.

Earlier this month,TRAIs quarterly performance report said the regulator had received 1,418 complaints regarding service quality.

It showed 391 grievances against Bharti Airtel,232 against Reliance Communications,190 against Vodafone and 155 against Idea Cellular. TRAI reported 201 complaints against BSNL and 60 against MTNL.

Airtel blamed poor infrastructure,electricity shortages and law-and-order problems in the North East for not meeting service quality benchmarks.

Vodafone said manpower shortages stopped it from connecting the required number of calls within 60 seconds.