What are the changes to the process for sale of SIM cards?

General Studies Paper 3

Introduction

• Seeking to further tackle the menace of cybercrimes and financial fraud, Union Minister for Telecommunications Ashwini Vaishnaw introduced two reforms. These entail a revision of norms for bulk procurement of SIM cards and registering the final point of sale (PoS) by the licensees (or providers). The reforms are meant to strengthen the citizen-centric portal Sanchar Saathi that was launched in May this year with the same objective.

Sanchar Saathi

• Broadly, the citizen-centric portal allows citizens to check the connections registered against their names, block mobile phones which are stolen or lost, report fraudulent or unrequired connections and verify the genuineness of a device (before a purchase) using the IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity).
• Sanchar Saathi has, till date, analysed 114 crore active mobile connections.

The reforms on PoS

• From now on, it will be mandatory for franchisee, agents and distributors of SIM cards — all PoS — to be registered with the licensees or the telecom network operator.
• The onus would be on the operator to carry out an “indisputable” verification of the PoS.
• Importantly, police verification (of the dealer) is mandatory.
• Existing SIM card providers have been given 12 months to comply with the registration requirements.
• If the PoS is found to be involved in any illegal activity, the agreement would be terminated with the entity being blacklisted for three years. It would also draw a penalty of ₹10 lakh.
• The DoT holds that these provisions would help in identifying, blacklisting and eliminating rogue PoS, from the licensees’ system and provide and encouragement to the upright PoS.

About  bulk SIM cards

• Broadly, the latest provisions would replace the system of ‘bulk procurement’ of SIM cards (by businesses, corporates or those meant for specific events) with a system of entailing ‘business’ connections — sizeable procurement by a registered business entity or enterprise.
• Elaborating on the premise, 20% of bulk-procured SIMs were misused.
• In the guise of bulk connections, a lot of SIMs would be procured and then they would make automated calls using a SIM-box.
• The minister added that another mechanism entailed using a certain number of SIMs from the bulk procurement to make a certain number of calls, destroying them and then using another batch.
• The latest reforms would endeavour to address these issues. The new norms maintain that though businesses can procure any number of connections, it would be subject to completing KYC requirements for all end-users.
• In other words, the final user— the executive who would be holding the connection — would have to undergo the KYC procedure.
• In order to prevent the misuse of printed Aadhaar, the provisions mandate that demographic details would be required by scanning the QR code of the printed Aadhaar. Subscribers would also have to undergo the entire KYC procedure for replacing their SIM; for a period of 24 hours, all outgoing and incoming SMS facilities would be barred.

Conclusion

• Thus, it would be essential to determine if they possess adequate infrastructure to carry out the entire process and more importantly have the necessary safeguards while dealing with such sensitive data.