In a cautious move, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has decided to get SIM re-verification campaign audited by Interior Ministry to make sure that SIM reverification process was carried out smoothly, reported The Nation.
After this audit, Ministry of Interior will establish if SIM reverification process, as a whole, was carried out well or not.
Citing an unnamed official from regulator, The Nation reported that PTA has written a letter to Ministry of Interior to form a team that would carry out audit of SIM re-verification process by visiting mobile phone companies’ offices.
This team from Ministry of Interior, along with experts from PTA, will make sure that mobile phone companies have re-verified each and every SIM while all un-verified numbers are blocked.
Apparently the telecom regulator doesn’t want to hold any responsibility for re-verification process and has invited Ministry of Interior to do a task that should have been done by PTA itself.
Having said this, the audit from Interior Ministry will remove the blame of un-registered SIMs from Telecom Industry for ever and no one would be able to point fingers on telecom companies for aiding anonymous communication.
It merits mentioning here that Mobile phone companies completed a three month long biometric re-verification campaign on Sunday through which 103 million prepaid SIMs were supposed to be re-verified by their legitimate owners.
Each mobile phone user was asked to go to service centre, franchise or retail outlet of his/her respective mobile operator and re-verify his identity by matching his/her thumb impression with NADRA’s database, thus ensuring that the owner of the registered SIM is indeed the legitimate CNIC holder against which the SIM is registered.
More than 26 Million SIMs were blocked for non-verification.
