By By Mehtab Haider
“We are going to hold a random survey in which thousands from selected samples will be asked questions to ascertain whether franchises of mobile operators are involved in selling SIMs without proper documents,” PTA Chairman Dr Mohammad Yaseen said in an exclusive interview with The News here at his office.
The PTA chairman was quite confident that despite a difficult economic situation the sector would continue to grow and mobile subscriber numbers would touch 100 million in next three to four years compared to existing 90 million.
He, in his official communications to the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) and the Finance Ministry, said the decision of increasing taxes on the cellular industry would hurt its growth.
“We will mainly focus on value addition services such as fixed broadband, wireless broadband, TV, internet on mobile and e-banking in future,” he said and promised that auction of 3G (third generation) licences would be done this calendar year.
Quoting Section 23 of regulatory act, the PTA chairman said the authority has prepared certain standard operating procedures (SOP) and all mobile operators are bound to implement it.
“If any operator or its franchise is found guilty, the PTA can impose penalty up to Rs350 million,” he added. He said the PTA carried out the same survey recently and clearly told the mobile operators that violators would be fined.
He said now the PTA wanted to go ahead in consultation with all stakeholders and mobile operators would be part and parcel of the upcoming survey which would launched from November 10 to 15, 2008.
He claimed that he brought a change in the working of PTA under which more focus would be shifted towards ensuring value addition and providing enabling environment to attract more investment in this growing sector.
He said he established a strategic cell soon after taking over the charge of PTA in order to devise strategy for attracting investment in the future line of action.
Answering a query about increased taxation on the cellular industry and its impact on growth, he said the growth of mobile phone witnessed a fall in first month (July 2008) but it started gaining momentum again in the remaining two month August and September of the current fiscal year.
“The higher taxation definitely hurts growth,” he said and added in the same breath that there was another counter argument which states that the increased taxation would ensure efficient usage of it.
The chairman said they have so far blocked 10.8 million SIMs as the government devised three phases for tackling this issue on which the PTA completed first two phases. In first phase, the PTA blocked SIMs related to old data and in the second phase the authority blocked SIMs of those who possessed more than 10 SIMs.
He said third phase would be quite critical under which the PTA would check whether SIMs were right or wrong out of 10. “We need consumers’ cooperation in this regard,” he concluded.