The SMS rate hike on Diwali raises hackles
The hugely popular and easy mode of communication, the ubiquitous ‘SMS’, has suddenly found itself in the throes of a religious controversy and legal action.
All thanks to some canny service providers, who would not let go of any opportunity to rake in extra moolah during the festive season, and the ‘upholders’ of Hindu faith who feel that hiking the sms rates during Diwali tantamounts to discrimination.
Service providers in Gujarat have announced a hike in SMS tariff during the two-day Diwali celebrations on October 16 and 17. The rates would be double than normal, they said. Wracked by a sense of outrage, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has sent legal notices to all cell phone service providers over their policy of hiking SMS rates during Diwali.
“It is not proper to charge extra for SMSes during festivals as people greet one another during such days,” VHP’s lawyer Deepak Shukla told The Pioneer on Friday.
The legal notices, sent on behalf of VHP international general secretary Pravin Togadia, said that doubling of SMS rates during Diwali amounts to discrimination. The legal notices also mention that the SMS charges were not hiked during other religions festivals.
The volume of SMSes during festivities has gone up manifold over the last few years in urban and semi-urban areas of Gujarat.
Shukla said that the SMS rates were not hiked during Eid this year or Christmas last year, but agreed that the tariff was raised on the eve of the English New Year.
Diwali is the main festival of Hindus and thus raising the rates of SMS is discriminatory against Hindus, argued Shukla.
The VHP has also written to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to intervene in the matter and stop cell phone service providers from charging extra during Diwali.
Shukla said that the cell phone operators should immediately withdraw the enhanced rates or else a suit would be filed against them in the court.
Ironically, while the hiking of SMS tariff during Diwali has invited the ire of the VHP, many past instances of cell phone operators to enhance their revenue have largely been ignored.
One of them was circulation of a rumour on the night of Raksha Bandhan that the ‘timing’ of the event was inauspicious, forcing women to make frantic calls and SMS their brothers urging them to throw away the rakhi before daybreak.
But the more reprehensible profiteering by cell phone service providers was during last year’s SMS campaign on the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai, when a large text went into circulation that expressed anguish and anger and ended urging all to forward the message to everyone in their contact list.
Out of instantly enhanced patriotism following the 26/11 event, many did forward that long text without realising that charges for it were not for a single SMS but for multiple smses. Little did the people realise that their SMS-expression of patriotism actually meant huge revenues for the service providers.
Though no conclusive, judicially admissible evidence has been found to prove that the long SMS was actually ‘planted’ by cell phone service providers or their consultancy agencies, doubts about such a probability remain in public mind.
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