Why you may have to pay for having a mobile or landline number

You could soon have to pay a fee for your mobile number or your landline number as per a proposal by telecom regulator Trai which said that since phone number “represent an exceedingly valuable public resource which is not infinite”, charges can be imposed on mobile operators. These can then be recovered from users as per the proposal which is also considering whether to impose penalties on operators who are holding on to number resources with low utilisation.