KARACHI, May 18: As the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Wednesday blocked another 875,000 unverified cellphone connections for `cleaning` of mobile subscribers` data, the announcement by the interior minister last month to ban the sale of cellphone connections in the open market for the same purpose proved `wrong` because no such proposal was even under discussion between the operators and the regulators, officials and mobile companies` representative said.
While the PTA initiative launched through the mobile phone operators to streamline subscribers` data by blocking unverified connections entered its fourth phase, the decision announced by Interior Minister Rahman Malik amid growing complaints from the Sindh security administration to make service providers post SIMs (subscribers` identity modules) to subscribers` address was yet to be implemented.
Surprisingly enough, officials at the cellular companies and the telecom watchdog found the minister`s statement `wrong`, citing that no such proposal was even under discussion between them. They said the SIMs sales would continue under the `policy already designed and agreed upon by the stakeholders`.
“We came to know about his statement through the media and we don`t know why the announcement was made by the minister,” said an official.
“There is no plan to introduce a mechanism which requires that new SIMs shall only be delivered through a registered post at purchaser`s address according to his national identity card.”
He said the PTA and companies kept reviewing measures for better coordination and security purposes but there was no such deliberation on these lines in any recent meeting neither was there any input on such basis from the interior ministry.
The interior minister and Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah had discussed law and order in the province last month at a meeting held at the CM`s House before Mr Malik told the media that the new mechanism was being made effective with immediate effect.
The assurance from the federal minister had then lifted hopes of the officials at the provincial security set-up, but now after nearly a month, many of them were surprised over the non-implementation of the announced measures designed with mutual understanding.“We were under the impression that it`s going to be effective within a few days,” said Sharfuddin Memon, the adviser to the home ministry. “But that has not been the case and unfortunately we are not hearing or being updated from any quarters concerned on the subject. We proposed it after months of deliberation [with] and [getting] input from every concerned quarter, including police and other law-enforcement agencies.”
He appreciated the PTA effort to streamline the cellphone subscribers` data but said it could not bring the desired results until the reforms were not introduced at the sales level, as the existing system of issuing new connections had some basic flaws.
The cellular operators, however, argued that they were bound to follow PTA directives and it was `beyond possibility` to look into every proposal forwarded by the interior ministry and the law-enforcement agencies.
“The cellular operators have blocked some 16.2 million SIMs since October 2009,” said a senior cellular company official. “We lost business and paid the price for what went wrong at our end. But there should be a realisation on part of the government and other agencies that seeking multimillion investments from mobile phone companies only to facilitate their performance does not make sense.
Source: Dawn
Date:5/19/2011
