HENCY R SHAH AND ASSOCIATES

  SUBSCRIBERS’ WIN OVER TELECOM OPERATORS Buying a recharge plan with 28 days validity or less is like paying for pizza with less or no cheese. A 30 days validity plan sounds like a more complete package. Following the concerns expressed by several telecom subscribers over such 28 days validity plans, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India decided to take an action on this and therefore, asked telecom operators to offer vouchers with a validity of 30 days. “Every Telecom Service Provider shall offer at least one Plan Voucher, one Special Tariff Voucher, and one Combo Voucher which shall be renewable on the same date of every month, and if the date of such renewal is not available in a month, the date of renewal shall be the last date of that month,” the telecom regulator said in a release. Abiding by these rules, telcos launched monthly validity plans for their customers that offer either 30 days of validity or 1-month validity. Now TRAI in its latest press release has liste...

In a crackdown on illegal digital lending platforms, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will soon prepare a ‘whitelist’ of all legal applications (apps) that offer loans, and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) will ensure only these apps are hosted on app stores. “The RBI will monitor the ‘mule/rented’ accounts that may be used for money laundering and review or cancel dormant NBFCs (non-banking financial companies) to avoid their misuse. The RBI will ensure that registration of payment aggregators be completed within a timeframe and no unregistered payment aggregator be allowed to function after that,” the finance ministry said in a statement on Friday. The decisions were taken in a meeting chaired by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday. The steps by the government come after illegal loan apps hosted on app stores have been found offering micro-credit to the pandemic-hit people and low-income g...