People frantically swarm telecom offices to restore phones

People frantically swarm telecom offices to restore phones

SRINAGAR: A day after the government partially resumed mobile phone services in the Valley, hundreds of subscribers thronged offices of telecom operators to get their postpaid mobiles restored.
Due to more than two months communications blackout, subscribers could not pay their monthly rentals resulting in blocking of incoming and outgoing services. Subsequently, with the government lifting the ban on 40 lakh postpaid mobile phones, subscribes frantically reached the offices to pay their bills so as to restore their mobile phones.
At the government-owned BSNL, hundreds of aggrieved subscribers assembled to get their grievances including technical glitches resolved.
A BSNL subscriber Nazir Ahmad reached the central office Lal Chowk after he found his phone was not working despite clearing his monthly dues on Monday. A day later, his complaint was still unaddressed.
“An employee told me that there was a technical glitch in the system that had stopped both incoming and outgoing on my phone. It was fixed and I was told to wait for an hour. But now more than two hours later, my phone is still dead,” Ahmad said.
Rush of subscribers was so intense at that the BSNL had to deploy additional forces at the gate to prevent people from entering the office after 4pm, the official time for closing entry to people in the office.
Likewise, the same rush was witnessed at the offices of private telecom providers such as Airtel, Jio etc.
At Badamibagh office of Airtel, a swarm of subscribers was waiting in courtyard to get their phones restored. The company had set up three counters in open to listen to grievances. One was meant for bill payments, the other for issuing fresh connections, and the third for checking the reason for blocked services.
But at both the offices, many subscribers left without paying their bills due to long queues and slow processing systems. Accordingly, many said they got their bills paid through their friends and relatives based outside the state to circumvent long queues.

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