Rajkot civic body slaps Rs 1 crore fine on Reliance Jio

The Rajkot Municipal Corporation has slapped an ad-hoc penalty of Rs 1 crore to Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio Infocomm for discrepancies in cable laying approvals taken by company, the civic body stated.

In an official communique, RMC stated that following discrepancies found in cable laying approvals, the cable laying work of the company had been stalled whereas installed cables were being removed.

What's more, the company has been given a deadline of March 15, 2015 for payment of the Rs 1 crore penalty. According to RMC, in case Reliance Jio fails to make payments by or on March 15, a First Information Report (FIR) and Criminal Offence would be lodged against the company.

An emailed query to the company remained unanswered.

It needs to be mentioned here that Reliance Jio Infocomm, Mukesh Ambani's ambitious telecom venture, has been conducting ground tests by offering free Wi-Fi services at several hotspots in major cities of Gujarat like Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Vadodara and Surat.

In what could indicate growing high speed data appetite among Internet users in Gujarat, Reliance Jio Infocomm's pilot test in the state has already seen over 200,000 users in last 8-9 months.

What's more, according to sources privy to the development, average daily high speed Internet data usage has been clocked at over 100 MB per user. The daily usage adds up to monthly data usage of roughly over 3 GB per user from Wi-Fi hotspots created by the company in major cities of Gujarat.

The company has been conducting ground tests since last 8-9 months for acceptability of high speed Internet in the state through dedicated Wi-Fi hotspots. Moreover, the company has also been offering free Wi-Fi at several major events in the state like 13th edition of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD), Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit 2015 and the ongoing National E-governance Summit in Gandhinagar.

Last year, the company had launched trial runs of high-speed data services by setting up eight Wi-Fi hot spots in Ahmedabad.

The trial runs in March 2014 were launched by the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi under the state government's e-nagar project. The maximum downloading speed in 3G is up to 4-5 mbps, while the average downloading speed at these Wi-Fi spots is much above 20 mbps.