TRAI Goofs; Puts up False Figures

The report that TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) revealed last week may have just gone out to show that the nation has truly, rapidly adapted to the mobile generation.

However, just as the celebratory bells rung louder, the truth was revealed. A bad mix-up of numbers is what best defines the report, as per the reports that have been trickling in ever since. Apparently, the TRAI analysts ‘researched’ that as of 2011, India was home to whopping 812 million mobile subscribers, the image below depicts the TRAI’s version of the magic number.

Sorry..Wrong number!

It didn’t need some rocket science technique for Voice&Data, an online resource centre for the Indian Telecom, to dish out the real picture. The TRAI had very conveniently taken up the mobile numbers to be the number signifying individual names of subscribers, which may not be necessarily true. It isn’t novelty that you see a person owning more than SIM card. In such a scenario, although there are multiple SIM cards on a person, it doesn’t make up for multiple subscribers. It was a simple calculation that went horribly wrong for the TRAI officials.

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India officially stands at 500 million mobile phone subscribers, as of now; and certainly not a dreamy 812 million. The TRAI goof-up story, however, doesn’t end just yet. The organization doesn’t have a count of the number of active and inactive ‘subscribers’ on its roster, thereby, making the final outcome still a far-from-the-truth version of its research.