Taking things personally

After the Supreme Court on Wednesday quashed the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) regulation that telecom service providers compensate consumers for call drops, senior counsel Kapil Sibal, who was representing the operators in court, took a jibe at the minister for communications and information technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad.

Without taking anyone's name, Sibal said, someone, popularly referred to as the "call drop" minister, took that moniker personally and conceived of this "populist" measure. Prasad, however, put the onus of the entire exercise on Trai, saying the next step would be decided by the regulator.

To put things in perspective, in October last year, Trai, in a notification, had asked telecom firms to compensate each consumer with Rs 1 for every call drop, subject to a maximum of three disrupted calls a day from January this year.