However analysts as they are wont are creatures of habit and don’t go out of their comfort zone.They try to stay in the territory of the obvious and don’t look at deeper problems.India has been rocked by a number of corruption scandals and telecom has been one of the biggest hit.Unitech Wireless one of the new operators is one the verge of having its properties attached by the Indian state while top executives on Reliance (ADAG) are in jail for colluding to defraud the Indian government of billions along with the former telecom minister Raja.While Airtel is not facing this problems,its insidious business practises are equally problematic if the come to light.In broadband companies in India,I wrote how service providers fleece and loot consumer through systematically fraudulent tactics.This is so widespread that I have no doubt that top management is aware if not actively promoting such activities.A refresher,telecom providers in India routinely activate value added services like ringtones (costing Rs 30/month) and other such services without the consumer’s consent.As the amount is small and most of the consumers are illiterate without having the knowledge of what’s happening ,these companies make a killing.Airtel is also doing this and making the biggest killing of the India consumer.Only a serious investigation on the lines of 2G telecom scam can uncover this corruption scam which goes on bringing hundreds of millions of illegal for these telecom companies.

The vendor choice itself shows total lack of judgment and good sense it seems and the contract law being what it is in India,any customer who goes to Sosasta is totally on his own if he wants to recover money which he has to pay upfront.I had personally applied to 2 vendors and nobody has been able to give the required service in the 2 months that had been alloted.After phoning Sosasta 3 times and mailing them twice I finally recieved the money back ,however in the case of the second service ,even after mailing them twice nothing has happened.On top of that the customer care phone numbers don’t pick up the phone.

It is a common practice amongst these companies to add value added services like caller tunes without the customer’s permission which is totally illegal.Since most of the customers do not know how the billing is happening and do not know how to turn it off,these companies make millions of dollars in illegal profits from such customers.Airtel,Reliance and other major telecom companies in India follow this practice widely and openly.Nobody is going to complain about 50c/month being charged wrongly by the telecom provider.However 50c multiplied by a 100 million customers is neat $50 million in profits for these companies.This overbilling of customers even extends to broadband customers as I recently found out .After a nightmarish experience with Tata Indicom whose pathetic customer service forced me to change to Airtel,I found a blatant case of overcharging of money in my very first bill.