The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has issued an order to re-verify the SIM of subscribers holding beyond nine connections across India and six connections in the case of Jammu and Kashmir, North East and Assam and disconnect in the case of non-verification.
The subscribers will be given the option to choose the connection they want to retain and deactivate the rest of the connections, according to the order issued on December 7.
“If during the data analytics carried out by DoT, it is found that an individual subscriber is having more than nine mobile connections (six in the case of J&K, NE and Assam LSAs) across all the TSPs (telecom service providers), all the mobile connections will be flagged for re-verification,” the DoT order said.
The order comes from DoT to check incidence of financial crimes, pesky calls, automated calls and fraudulent activities.
The DoT has asked telecom operators to remove all the flagged mobile connections from the database that are not in use as per the rule.
The outgoing (including data services) facilities of the “flagged mobile connection shall be suspended within 30 days” and “the incoming service shall be suspended within 45 days” in case subscriber has turned up for verification and exercises his option to surrender, transfer to disconnect mobile connections.