You may be aware that a few years back (in 2013), Department of Telecommunications brought in a regulation that at any point of time an individual can hold only nine connections in India. However this magic figure of 9 is often mis-interpreted by service providers. Also the process of checking the number of connections by the individual is not defined clearly. Hence this writer has taken the onus of escalating the following report to the Office of Prime Minister vide PMOPG/E/2016/0397737.

The report is hereunder.

Dear Team,

A couple of years back DoT has brought out a regulation that at any point of time an individual Indian citizen should not hold more than 9 telephone connections on his name. However there are several things which are unclear and raising a CpGrams to DoT keeps shunting the request from pillar to post and just getting closed without a tangible response. We would hence request you to kindly help with the same.

  1. Does the total number of connections include only mobile number or mobile and landline numbers?
  2. Does the total number of connections are per telecom license area or pan-India? A few years before MNP regime I might have had connections in the region and discarded use of that number. Would they start ticking in my name still?
  3. Where and how do we request for a list of total number of connections in our name (pan-India). Individual cell phone companies like AVoID cartel (Airtel Vodafone Idea cartel) they say they don’t have this facility. I have tried requesting to DoT and the request went to BSNL Ahmedabad and they asked me to file a RTI to DoT.
  4. I have requested information to DoT on the address to which send the RTI petition and documents that are needed. I am also concerned in sending the identity documents because RTI is a publicly available copy. Hitherto there hasn’t been any response from DoT yet.