Various political parties and consumer organisations on Friday criticised cellular operators for misleading the consumers by hiding information about fixed charges to be paid for availing the facility of free incoming calls on mobile-to-mobile.

"They (cellular operators) are supposed to make consumers aware of the real picture of both services as well as prices," Jagdish Shettigar, member of BJP Economic Cell, said.

The private cellular operators had earlier this week announced the facility of free incoming calls from mobile to mobile across various networks but had not clearly indicated that consumers would have to shell out about Rs 50 for this.

Consumers are not even aware that whether the facility offered by the cellular operators is optional or mandatory.

Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi of Congress said: "In the ongoing corporate war, people and consumers' interests must be explained transparently."

A Delhi-based consumer organisation, Telecom Watchdog said: "This reflects their (cellular operators') basic nature of extracting money from the consumers without even letting them know and without giving complete information."

“The telecom regulator has given cellular operators a free hand to decide on any type of cellular tariff structure and they are exploiting the situation," Anil Kumar, secretary of Telecom Watchdog, said.

"If anybody tries to hide information or mislead the consumers, this will be a fit case for TRAI to deal with such violations," Shettigar said.

Delhi Science Forum, which works in the field of consumer interests, said the ad-hoc approach adopted by TRAI was creating a situation in which the cellular operators, in the wake of a price war, were not giving complete information to the consumers.

"TRAI has not been handling the issue properly. With regard to issues like benefits to consumers, cost, pricing and entry fee amongst others must be decided by the regulator," D Raghunandan of DSF said adding that "unfortunately, TRAI adopted ad-hoc policy and allowed market forces to guide these things."

About the fixed charge of up to Rs 50, the cellular operators, a day later explained that pricing of services was individual operator's territory and therefore was not decided by the industry while discussing the issue of offering free incoming calls on cell-to-cell.

Moreover, the cellular operators said that this announcement was an interim one pending the announcement of interconnect user charge by the regulator.

Raghunandan said everyday the operators were coming out with new schemes in the wake of price war leading to lots of fluctuations in the tariffs.