The parliamentary standing committee on posts, telecommunication and information technology ministry has recommended the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) to take tough legal against those who are involved in illegal call termination, even if they are political personalities or government officers.
The parliamentary watchdog came up with the recommendation in a meeting at the parliament secretariat yesterday.
Zunaid Ahmed Palak, state minister of the information commission and technology, said the BTRC have been given the authority to take legal action against anyone involved in the illegal activity.
“We authorised the BTRC at today’s (Sunday) meeting, to take legal action against anyone, even a political leader or a government official,” Zunaid Ahmed told the Dhaka Tribune after the meeting.
In the existing legal framework, the BTRC has limited scope to take strong action. But now they will be more powerful in taking action against anyone involved in the illegal activity, he said.
The BTRC will also introduce a Centralised Monitoring System (CMS) for monitoring the whole process, he added.
The legal call minutes has recently increased to 9.7 crore minutes from about 6 crore minutes in the country as the government cut the call termination rate to US$ 0.015 from US$0.03 per minute, said Zunaid Ahmed.
Earlier on July 23, the parliamentary watchdog in a meeting recommended the BTRC for installing a system that can audit international calls in the country.
The BTRC had also floated an international tender for installing the CMS. But the telecom regulator canceled the tender suddenly before awarding the contract.
If the CMS is introduced, illegal calls would be brought down to zero and mobile operators would accurately be monitored, according to experts.
At today’s meeting, the committee also asked the BTRC to submit a report within a week about installation of the CMS, said Imran Ahmed, chairman of the parliamentary standing committee.
The committee also recommended that the country’s telecommunication policy be updated soon. The existing policy was introduced in 1998.
“We have achieved most of the goals of the existing telecommunication policy. By this time, technology has been improved significantly. So, the policy should be modernized,” Imran Ahmed said.
