MTNL Woes

Our landline phone in Mumbai is a MTNL connection. But it was in the name of the company for which my father works. Owing to some issues, we had to transfer the phone in our name. This requires just submitting an application and *supposedly* the needful should have been done in 1-2 days with no hassles. But some organisations never fail to disappoint us.

Firstly, from next day, our phone just went dead. After complaining for the same and waiting patiently for 3 days and receiving no response, the issue was escalated to GM, MTNL of the region. Its our best guess that after his intervention, our complaint was finally attended to, but after a time lag of 2 days. We do receive a call from the exchange who have 'fixed' our phone. But when we called on a mobile to check if the number is working fine, we got shock of our lives. They had interchanged our phone number with some other number! And on top of that, we kept receiving calls from the exchange asking if the phone was fixed or not. We told them everytime that the phone is fine but the number has changed. One kind person finally noted our original number and got back to us in an hour or so.

He dropped the second bomb now. He informed that according to MTNL, our original number is dicontinuted (for which we have given an application) and yes, another line has been wrongly fixed for us. We explained him that its just a transfer of ownership and no application for disconnecting has been submitted. After following it up, the confusion was resolved, we finally got our phone up and running with the correct phone number :)

But, agony was not over. Morons had withdrawn the STD/ISD facility for no good reason. Again, the issue was brought to MTNL's notice and thankfully the kind lady fixed the same in like 30 minutes! Good speed, I must say.

Last icing on the cake was still left. MTNL had disabled CLIP (Caller Identification) facility now. For this, a separate had to be initiated with the exchange to get it activated. It has been more than 10 days now, this small complaint still needs to be resolved.

I fail why MTNL complicated the whole operation. It was just a transfer of ownership of the phone, something which, in my opinion, needed documentation level changes. But it turned to be a long-drawm process for no reason.

I sincerely hope that MTNL strives to improve their working style in the times to come.