Vodafone protests TRAI’s inaction in Delhi HC case against Reliance Jio

The Delhi High Court today heard Vodafone’s plea against the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on the issue of the “free” promotional offers of Reliance Jio..Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva heard arguments from Senior Counsel Dayan Krishnan, lawyer for Vodafone, who alleged that TRAI had failed in its duties to regulate the telecom sector, as was its mandate..Krishnan told the bench that under the telecom regulations, there was a lower limit called the “floor”, below which any service provider was not allowed to offer tariffs. Further, even the promotional offers proposed by the service provider ought to be in compliance with the Interconnection Usage Charges (IUC) regulations..He told the bench,.“How it works is, suppose I am a service provider offering ten different plans out of which two contain free offers, the weighted average of all my plans should be consistent with the IUC charges.”.According to the telecom regulations, no promotional offer can extend beyond a period of ninety days, a rule that has been “blatantly violated” by Reliance Jio..The free voice calls offer launched by Jio on September 5 of last year was supposed to terminate on December 5, but was extended till March 31 of this year. As explained by Krishnan, Jio had also included in their terms and conditions that they reserved the right to “amend and extend” the offer..Krishnan also told the Bench that according to the regulations, there was a “reporting requirement”, under which it was an obligation of every service provider to report to TRAI at least seven days before making any changes in their tariffs..He alleged that although Reliance Jio was fulfilling its reporting requirement, Vodafone was aggrieved by TRAI’s inaction at the violations made by Jio. He stated,.“The problem here is the view taken by the regulator. They said ‘we are keeping a close watch on them’. Their close watch means letting them (Reliance Jio) do whatever they want.”.Senior Advocate Ramji Srinivasan, representing Reliance Jio, objected to the maintainability of the petition itself, stating that when all the other service providers were following the procedure of approaching TDSAT, why wasn’t Vodafone?.Justice Sachdeva listed the matter for further arguments on February 27, directing that he would grant five minutes to Srinivasan to argue on maintainability, and would then hear arguments by Krishnan.