Getting a phone in India

Now this was an experience worth mentioning. First of all, anybody walking off the street cannot get a cell phone in India. DH came here back in August and he couldn’t get a sim card for himself so a friend had to apply for it and lend him the sim card! In comparison, I was able to get off at London airport, go to a cell phone store in the terminal and get a new sim card within minutes!

When I came here last week, we started looking for a service provider. Now, since DH has been here for almost five months, it should have been easy enough for him to establish proof of residence, proof of employment and get it all checked out. You would think all this could be done over the phone but since physical verification of the address is required, it took, brace yourself, four days for our sim cards to be activated!

I understand all this added security is important because there have been way too many times cell phones have been misused here but four days?

The first step was getting the sim cards. Regular stores wouldn’t even entertain us because apparently we don’t have what passes for proof of residence in Bangalore. Thankfully his office has an agent who is a representative of the cell phone company dedicated to help the employees( the perks of working in India! You get your own rep for the cell phone conglomerate).So, getting the sim cards with the number was a matter of hours. So far, so good.

And then the wait started. The cell phone company needed to verify his employment and residence before the cards could be activated. They called us to say they would verify his employment on Tuesday but DH was sick and at home so, it got delayed. I still don’t understand why they couldn’t verify the residence on Tuesday since he was home but what do I know? Anyway, the employment verification happened on Wednesday ( although now that I come to think about it, was it really necessary since the Airtel rep delivered the SIM cards to the office originally!!!) and we had to wait another day for the residence verification to happen. Why they couldn’t do both on the same day beats me!

Thursday afternoon, somebody shows up at our door and asks if DH lives here. I answer in the affirmative. He asks some legit questions about the duration of the stay, whether we are renting or own the place etc. Finally he asks for address proof! At this point I am thinking, hello! Did I not just answer all your questions? Anyway, he explains he needs a copy of a utility bill or something which shows him as the occupant and finally a light goes on somewhere in my head. I can understand the need for paperwork to establish proof of residence.

BTW this was a total surprise! We didn’t expect them to ask us for a copy of the utility bill. If that was all it took, was it really necessary to physically verify the location? When I gave him a blank look, he says, anything would suffice, even a visiting card!!!! At this point the entire purpose of checking and rechecking identity is lost on me because as far as I can see, anybody could print visiting cards and have their name on it. AND the visiting card that “sufficed” as proof of residence, didn’t even have our home address on it!

It is a mystery to me why they have such detailed rules and processes when there is always a loophole for all of them! I think the verification process is good because at some level it limits the misuse of cell phones by antisocial elements but if it takes 4 days for somebody to get a cell phone activated, I think there is room for improvement in the process.

This wasn’t the end of it either. After all this verification, the agent calls us and congratulates us on being proud owners of new numbers with the cell phone company. DH tries to get the sim card installed and SURPRISE! “No Service”. So, he calls customer service and asks them what was going on. The customer service is not only unhelpful, they hang up on him! So, he calls his office rep for the phone company who promptly conferences a customer service rep in, gives him a piece of his mind and asks him to figure out what’s going on. After being on hold for 15 minutes, they don’t know what the issue is. Finally somebody figures out that after all this verification, we had to call them back and ask them to activate the sim cards. It’s ok to expect a new sim card to be activated but it would have been nice if somebody had told us that!

So DH calls and gets the sim cards activated and 15 minutes later we had service! YAY! But wait; what’s this, we don’t have access to the data network! WHAT????? So we get on the phone again and you guessed it, data network activation needs ANOTHER call! At this point I am speechless! We want to call and yell at them but don’t see a point in it so we call back and politely ask our data access to be activated. Finally after another 15 minutes on the phone and ANOTHER 15 minutes of waiting we have both phones working! Phew, what an evening. Just thinking about it makes me feel tired! Jet lag is still keeping me up though L. Trying to go to sleep now, stay tuned for more…