For years operators met this complaint with a jurisdiction objection rather than an answer on the merits. That objection is gone, and it is worth knowing why before you write to anyone.
The jurisdiction point, and how it was settled
Telecom companies used to rely on a two judge decision holding that Section 7B of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, which provides for a statutory arbitration of disputes between a telegraph authority and a person for whose benefit a line is provided, sent the subscriber to arbitration and closed the consumer forum. On 16 February 2022 a three judge bench of the Supreme Court, hearing appeals involving Vodafone Idea, declined to follow that view and held that the existence of a statutory arbitration under the 1885 Act does not oust the jurisdiction of the consumer forum. The reasoning was that consumer legislation is itself a special protective statute and cannot be pushed aside as though it were general law.
The Telecommunications Act, 2023 has since been enacted and provides for the repeal of the 1885 Act. That does not disturb the position, because the foundation of it is Section 100 of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, which makes the Act's remedy additional to and not in derogation of any other law. A sectoral regulator, a licence condition or a statutory arbitration sits alongside the commission. None of them replaces it.
What the deduction is, in law
Notice what you do not have to prove. You are not alleging fraud, and you do not need to show that somebody at the operator intended to cheat you. You need to show that a charge appeared for something you did not agree to buy, and that the operator cannot produce your consent. In practice the operator's own record is what decides it, because if consent was properly taken there is a log of it and they will produce it.
The order of operations
Go to the operator first, and go in writing. Every licensed operator runs a consumer care number and a two tier internal escalation with an appellate authority, and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India requires that structure and publishes what a subscriber can expect from it. You want the docket number from that complaint on your file, whatever the outcome, because it dates your grievance and it shows the commission that you did not run straight to litigation. Deactivate the service the same day by whatever route the operator offers, and keep the confirmation.
- Itemised bills or prepaid deduction statements for the whole period, with every disputed entry marked and totalled
- The activation message, if one ever came, and its exact timestamp
- Your deactivation request and the confirmation, since a continuing deduction after that is a separate and much worse fact
- The complaint docket number from consumer care and the reference from the appellate authority
- Screenshots from the operator's own app showing the active subscription and the date it began
- A written demand for the operator's record of your consent, which is the request they usually cannot answer
Prepaid and postpaid are not the same problem
On a postpaid connection the charge appears as a line on a bill you can call for, dispute and refuse to pay, and the operator has to justify it before it can take enforcement steps. On prepaid the money is simply gone from the balance, there is no bill in the ordinary sense, and the subscriber often has nothing but a balance that keeps dropping. That difference decides how you build the file. A prepaid subscriber should ask the operator in writing for the deduction history for the whole period along with the record of the consent on which each deduction was made, and should ask for it before deactivating, because deactivation sometimes clears the subscription record from the app. If the operator will not produce a subscriber's own transaction history, plead the refusal as a separate deficiency under Section 2(11) rather than treating it as an inconvenience, and ask the commission to direct production. It usually does, and the record when it comes is often the end of the matter.
What I tell people about these matters
They are won on the itemised bill, not on the strength of the grievance. A complaint that says the operator has been cheating me for months, with no statement attached, is very hard to help. A complaint that attaches fourteen lines of billing, each circled, with a deactivation request that was ignored twice, more or less argues itself. Get the itemised statement before you write anything, and if the operator will not give it, put that refusal in writing too, because a refusal to produce a subscriber's own billing record is itself a deficiency. The answer on territorial jurisdiction explains how to plead the Bengaluru filing, and our step by step guide to filing covers the mechanics.