NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel has sent a letter to the telecom department slamming Reliance Jio's allegations that channel partners of rival telcos were inciting and provoking agitators involved in tower disruption.
"The baseless allegation made by Jio that Airtel is behind the farmer agitation to “sabotage” their network and to force customers to switch to Airtel is simply outrageous," Airtel's chief regulatory officer, Rahul Vatts, said in letter to the DoT secretary Anshu Prakash dated December 28.
"We have seen a history of Jio going to any length to make baseless allegations, adopt bullying tactics and use intimidatory behaviour to suit their purposes and meet their goals. This is another such instance," the telco said in the letter.
The Sunil Mittal-led telco said that Jio's complaint should be dismissed "with the contempt that it deserves". "We also wish to emphatically state that not a single part of any supporting annexure to the complaint by Jio demonstrates any evidence that Airtel has any hand in the ongoing issues that Jio is facing."
Airtel said that a similar allegation had been levelled by Jio in a letter to the telecom regulator earlier in December to which the company had responded.
"...we are amused as to how Jio can even believe that Airtel would be so omnipotent as to make customers forcibly port out of Jio. If we had this power, we would have exercised it over the last three years when Jio amassed a massive number of customers...the baseless allegation made by Jio that Airtel is behind the farmer agitation to 'sabotage' their network and to force customers to switch to Airtel is therefore simply outrageous," Vatts said.
Jio's letter to the DoT had claimed that "majority of the current sabotage and damage of Jio network in Punjab, Haryana and some other parts of the country is as a result of the blatant efforts by some of the distributors, retailer and channel partners of Airtel and Vodafone Idea in a malicious and inciteful campaign to capitalise on the ongoing farmers protest".
Jio had said the target of the campaign was to disrupt its services and leverage these disruptions to promote mobile number portability to other networks.
Airtel said Jio's complaint against the company was "in poor taste".
"The irony of the situation is that while the operating teams were having several conversations over the last few days on how to provide support to the Jio teams based on their request, Jio was actually spending time drafting frivolous letters and making scurrilous allegations," Airtel said.
Airtel said that telecom is an essential infrastructure and we believe it is against the law to indulge in such acts. "As a matter of fact, we have always advocated firm Government action to ensure 100 per cent continuity of networks," it added.
The Sunil Mittal-led telco urged the DoT to bring forth a policy to mandate ICR (Intra circle roaming) in such situations of vandalism and network outages as a matter of course so that customers were never inconvenienced.
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