COAI kept out of Trai meeting on Reliance Jio request: Director Rajan S Mathews

NEW DELHI: The telecom regulator has asked Cellular Operators Association of India ( COAI) to get its Director-General Rajan Mathews to apologise and retract his comments that the sectoral watchdog had asked him to leave a meeting on interconnect issues at the “behest” of Reliance Jio.

“In order to set the record straight, the Director General, COAI may be directed to to retract his false statement made in the media and issue apologies for the same,” Trai wrote in a letter to COAI chairman Gopal Vittal on Friday. Trai said Mathews’ comments to the media is to “say the least patently wrong, mischevious and perhaps made with malafide intention.”

Earlier in the day, Mathews was not allowed to be part of a meeting to resolve the interconnect issue, as ties between the industry body that represents India's GSM telecom operators, and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) and Reliance Jio Infocomm took a turn for the worse. In a press statement Friday, Mathews said he was kept out of the crucial meeting “at the insistence of Reliance Industries and Jio, and Trai acquiesced to their demand in an unprecedented manner”, taking a potshot also at the regulator. Jio is a wholly-owned unit of Reliance Industries.

In its letter to Vittal, Trai explained neither COAI nor any other industry association was invited for the meeting since the issue involved bilateral arrangements between mobile phone operators. “This was also clarified to Mr Rajan Mathews, director general, COAI before the meeting,” Trai wrote. Jio board member Mahendra Nahata, who represented the company at the meeting, also denied any role in TRAI keeping COAI out of the discussions. “We have not said any such thing. Whosoever was invited should attend the meeting,” Nahata said.

Executives from both sides traded charges. One said Mathews had gone to the meeting to represent smaller telcos such as Telenor and Aircel who hadn’t been invited but were also a party to the whole interconnect issue. Another said Mathews shouldn’t have gone since only specific telcos were invited, and no association members.

The acrimony between them comes in the backdrop of COAI’s criticism of the regulator, accusing it of being biased against incumbent telco, which Trai chairman RS Sharma had rejected. COAI has previously accused Jio of bypassing regulations and running full commercial operations in the guise of trials.