The prevailing mobile phone culture has become really annoying and is a drain on our personal budgets.
KARACHI: The prevailing mobile phone culture has become really annoying and is a drain on our personal budgets. After the latest tax rise, we pay a 25 per cent tax on our phone calls, which means that when we upload credit worth Rs100 on our phone, Rs75 is actually the amount made available to us for our use. This amounts to almost paying a luxury tax! Well, maybe for a country where 65 per cent of the population lives on or below the poverty line mobile phones should be regarded as a luxury — however, they are clearly not. Every worker in Pakistan has a phone and now it is feared that rather than buy food for their children our misled working class would rather buy a jazz card, treating it as a necessity of life.
Our mobile phone companies are encouraging people in doing so; worst of all, these companies are persistently contacting consumers, asking them to upload more money for gaining access to ‘free’ SMS or calls, so as to hook them further on to their phones. This kind of pushy marketing should be prohibited by the authorities concerned. This behaviour is damaging for our society and it distracts people from what is really important for them.
Internet service providers are other kinds of exploiters. Social media, instead of playing a positive role, has destructive results in most cases. On the one hand, the internet does not work on the specified speeds and on the other hand, companies are selling thousands of Wi-Fi USBs and devices at very high prices. In some cases, there are no after sales service provisions and consumers have to pay extra to get devices, etc. fixed. What other novel arrangements have these companies devised to further fleece simple Pakistanis?
The government has a responsibility to protect the consumers and no company should be allowed to get away with unsolicited marketing or not providing after sales service.
Ali Ashraf Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, September 20th, 2013.
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