Call Centre CEO Arrested for Unpaid Bills
By Pulkit Sharma

The Kerala Police has arrested the CEO of an unauthorised Call Centre in Kochi last week on the basis of a complaint from BSNL authorities regarding unpaid telephone bills. According to the complaint lodged with the police, Mohammed Ali of Kozhikode took a connection from BSNL under the super mega scheme for his firm Malabar Infoway in Kochi, but refused to pay for it.

Mohammed had defaulted on the bill payments to the tune of Rs.44 lakhs and an internal vigilance inquiry conducted by BSNL found that he was using the connection to operate a call centre, without permission from the local authorities. After BSNL lodged the complaint, the accused had closed down his firm and was absconding for some time.

A senior official of the Kerala IT Mission (the nodal agency promoting the use of IT & ITES in Kerala) told techgoss on conditions of anonymity that several unauthorised Call Centres were operating in the state. Most of them are small operations with six or seven seats while some have just two or three seats. The work done is mostly outsourced or on contract from third party vendors catering to services in the local language. Grossly underpaid agents in a setup which has the bare minimum infrastructure or facility operate these so called Call Centres.