CHENNAI: Cracking the whip on phone-in shows that charge customers heavily by luring them to participate, the Civil Supplies and Consumer Protection Department issued a notice last week to the service providers of a private channel asking it to pay `50 lakh as compensation to the State Consumer Welfare Fund for telecasting such a programme. The department has also addressed the Competition Commission of India to order the stoppage of such programmes to all cable TV network service providers.This follows a complaint received from a voluntary organisation Citizen, Consumer and Civil Action Group against a show in a private channel called Cinema Theriyuma, in which customers are lured to respond to easy film-related questions by calling a given phone number. ‘The calls are not connected and put on hold for several minutes and then get disconnected. Yet, call charges of `10 per minute are deducted from the consumer’s account,’ stated the department in its notice, adding that the service providers earned a lot of money by this method. The notice has also been issued to the private channel that telecast the programme, which has also been asked to pay up the fine amount of `50 lakhs, according to a senior department official.
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