As the Lockdown got declared and the whole Nation went into a state of complete standstill in India on 25th March 2020, I realised that I was stuck at home with nothing to do and no one to meet. The only source of entertainment or earning livelihood because of Work From Home setups was by Internet. That’s when I realised how important and necessary a role Internet plays in our daily lives. 

As I realised the role of Internet in my life I noticed that no matter where I stayed in the Country or which Internet Service Provider (ISP) I chose, no one provided a satisfactory service. Local ISPs or the big Multi National ones, all were the same.

It was only because of staying at home during Lockdown that I realised that more time was being spent in complaining about the non-functioning internet than in actually using it and even then resolution was not prompt. The resolution was only provided after numerous follow ups and the service remained poor even after that. The Customer Support is also a joke and only used like a smokescreen to distract the users without ever providing any real solutions. The level-1 executives do not have much authority to provide any real solutions other than updating the regional team(s) and it is nearly impossible to get past them to a Senior Level executive, because of the current Customer Care Model being followed by these companies. 

Upon conducting further research, I found out that I was not the only one who was facing such issues. There were millions more and online complaint boards and consumer complaint forums are filled with people and their complaints regarding this issue, but none of them has found a solution for them.

Some of the complaints were regarding Internet not working or Non-functioning Internet, some other were regarding slow speed or frequent disconnection and some were of threatening calls and harassment or wrong promises by the ISP while most of them were about delay in providing service, be it installation service of new connection(s), fault repairing service of existing connection(s) or disconnection of no longer needed connections.  The problem persisted even when ISPs had collected the payment for the said service in advance. But, the more interesting and eye opening fact was that most of the people who were facing problems with these service(s) were either trying to disconnect their existing connections after which the ISP has to refund the initially collected Security Deposit or were trying to shift their existing connection(s) from one location to another location, in which case the regional partner(s) or distributor(s) of the ISP are loosing a customer and the revenue generated from them in that particular area while the regional partner(s) or distributor(s) in the new location are incurring more expenses for sometime for providing infrastructure to an existing customer who will not be paying for that service as a privilege of being an existing customer. 

In conclusion, it was found that because of the tug of war being played between the ISPs and their Regional Partner(s) for deciding, who gets to keep the lion’s share of the revenue generated from a Customer, they forget to take care of the Customer’s issues and in all this, it is only the Customer who loses his/ her valuable time, money and mental peace. 

Help me, in spreading this message and seeking a resolution for this ever-present and ever-growing problem and seeking help from the Union Minister of Law and Justice, Electronics and Information Technology and Communication, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad and Cabinet Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Shri Ram Vilas Paswan, by Signing this Petition