Government needs to support telcos for carrying out SIM re-verification

Under the national action plan to eliminate terrorism from the country, Government of Pakistan is considering to lower the verification charges for a short period of time to make the SIMs re-verification process faster in which 103 million SIMs will be carried out in multiple phases. The meeting was held yesterday between Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, Minister of State for IT Anusha Rehman, Interior Minister Ch. Nisar, officials of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and representatives of telecom companies.
The decision was taken by the government on the concerns of telecom operators who were not agreed for the re-verification of SIMs as it was a costly procedure and additionally would be resulting into potential loss of revenue from blocking unregistered SIMs which are high in number presently.
During the meeting, telecom operators proposed to cut short the tax from 19.5% to 17%, however, the government has not agreed upon this so far though it is being announced that NADRA will be charging only Rs. 10 for the re-verification of each SIM card instead of Rs. 23 to ease the process of re-verifiaction for the telecom companies. Representatives of telecom companies also put forward a demand of legal cover in case of plausible litigation for blocking the SIMs by the consumers, and the government has agreed upon this too and IT Minister is being asked to formulate concrete proposals to address the issue. Telecom operators have also demanded the reversal of increase in Custom Duty for Telecom Equipment Imports but the government has not given any stance on this yet. To carry out the SIM re-verification process, the subscribers have been divided into two categories: 1. Troubled Areas having 28 million subscribers 2. Remaining Areas having 81 million subscribers The process will be accomplished by means of five steps according to the proposed plan. The first step of the action plan will be carried out with immediate effect from January 12, 2015 in which the grey list of the Troubled Areas will be targeted only and for this reason, ATL and BTL campaigns will soon be started for subscribers to cooperate with the respective telecom companies. In this all scenario, the number of SIMs that will be deactivated are estimated around 30% to 40% due to which the telecom companies will be facing around 8 billion revenue loss monthly and for the compensation of such heavy loss, the industry is compelled to demand relief in the form of taxes and other support from the government.