Just because criminals and terrorists use prepaid mobile service, do we have to do away with prepaid service altogether? Just because a vegetable knife was found in a murder scene, do we have to stop manufacturing knives?
And how is the government of Nagaland going to ban prepaid services in a month? Re-verification drive was informed in the month of January 2011 following direction from the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) to re-verify all prepaid mobile users across Northeastern states on or before January 19. However, this exercise turned out to be ‘humanly impossible’ as Chief Secretary described it, for large number of mobile users. Nagaland government issued a letter to the union ministry telecommunication seeking six months extension for the re-verification of identity of the prepaid mobile users in the state but it was still a burden especially for people in the villages. So, how does the government expect all rural folks to switch over to post-paid service in a month’s time? Prepaid users are far more than post paid users in Nagaland or anywhere and it is impossible to carry out this exercise without causing much suffering to the people. Instead of deactivating prepaid SIM cards on failure to submit the required documents to the telecom operators, why should the services be banned?
Prepaid services have more flexibility and suits especially poor people. As per one’s individual need, one may choose certain plan, sms pack, pocket internet pack and other offers but in post paid, regardless of amount of use, one has to pay fixed amounts every month with taxes and this increases the effective per call rate. There can be no better services than pre-paid. The increasing count of pre-paid subscribers well substantiates the fact.
Doing away with prepaid will also adversely affect telecom companies as the number of users will decline in hurry and who knows if certain companies will pack their bags and leave? It is the competition between service providers which allows customers to go for the best service at the most reasonable rates.
Instead of trying to throw away the baby with the bath water, why doesn’t the government go stricter on verification of prepaid users? The problem is not prepaid service per se. Prepaid services are too easy to acquire and that is the problem.
I don’t refute the claim that around 90% of the crimes in the State are committed using pre-paid SIM card. But I wonder what this actually means. Is this 90% out of all the crimes put together or out of all the crimes committed using telephones? It would be absurd that over 90% of all crimes are telephone related. So, if this means that out of all the telephone related crimes, 90% are pre-paid users and 10% are therefore post paid users, well we have an interesting situation. Now that over 90% of the phone users in Nagaland use prepaid sim cards, it is statistically insignificant that 90% of the crimes are committed using pre-paid connections. Hence using postpaid or prepaid service doesn’t make any difference in crime related issues.
Vezo Luruo
Kohima
