Billing woes put BSNL customers in a spot

BANGALORE: When over 9.5 lakh BSNL customers in Bangalore got their landline bills this month, many were left quite confused and felt cheated.
Confused because there were numerous acronyms like CMR, Gross/Free, DR, CR, and numerals printed alongwith the regular bill, and cheated because free calls of one month cannot be carried forward, said an announcement in the bill.
But Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has not been allowing free calls to be carried over from May 2003, ever since the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India indicated so in an order, say BSNL officials. The announcement however says `henceforth''.
"These new features are a result of the TRAI order that came in May. TRAI had directed us to give customers the monthly split of the phone calls and charges in bi-monthly bills. It was TRAI that decided not to allow carry-over of unused free calls in a month," Karnataka Telecom Circle CGM K Padmanabhan told The Times of India.
Earlier, free calls if not fully utilised in the first month of the billing cycle were carried over to the second month. It may be easy for a General package user to utilise all his 50 free calls in one month.
But even for a household that makes a large number of calls, utilising all 1,800 free calls every month under the Super package in a month may be a long call!
The latest bill also has a new column called Debit Charges. For consumers who have opted for any of BSNL''s three packages, the rental will now appear as Rs 200.
The balance amount will be included as plan charges or debit charges. BSNL officials explain that this split is a result of the fact that BSNL may have to cough up a 20 per cent sales tax on the rentals in retrospective from 1983 if the Supreme Court rules so in an ongoing hearing on an appeal by telecom operators; there has been an interim stay order.
Karnataka Circle alone will owe the government over Rs 120 crore in backlog. Says Ian Robson, a consumer activist and BSNL consumer: "The previous bills were straightforward and the common man could understand it. But now it''s too complicated. The problem is that such organisations do not educate the consumer before introducing new fancy features. There are thousands of BSNL users who are semi-literate. How will they know?''
The small figures and acronyms are the month-wise split-up in the bi-monthly bill. On the left hand side of the bill is the monthly Current Meter Reading (CMR), the debit call rates-DR-(calls booked for alarm service), credit calls -CR (calls made by telephone authorities to check the phone in case of faults), the number of free calls made and the rate at which the remaining calls have been charged.