The Ministry of Communications and IT has stated that the government has imposed a cumulative penalty of Rs 21.79 billion till September 2014 on the telecom operators for the violation of customer verification guidelines. The maximum penalty has been imposed on Aircel at Rs 4.86 billion, followed by Reliance Communications at Rs 4.54 billion and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited at Rs 3.29 billion till end-September 2014. The ministry added that a penalty of Rs 3.09 billion has been imposed on Bharti Airtel and Rs 2.11 billion on Vodafone India, while Idea Cellular has been fined an amount of Rs 1.23 billion for violation of the verification guidelines over the same period.

The government has also imposed a penalty of Rs 1.72 billion on Tata Teleservices Limited, Rs 5.23 billion on Sistema Shyam TeleServices Limited and Rs 1.16 billion on Telewings Communications for the same violations.

Further, the ministry has found that about four per cent of customer application forms were non-compliant to the subscriber verification guidelines during 2013-14.

Meanwhile, it has stated that verification of the identity of the subscribers by the telecom operators is mandatory and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has been continuously issuing guidelines for the same. DoT had issued the latest instructions on subscriber verification on August 9, 2012.