How a cloud startup is battling the government for its survival

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Ambarish Gupta and about 170 of his teammates were about to log off for the day around 7.30 pm, last Tuesday, when an unexpected error occurred.

His Gurgaon-based company Knowlarity runs the backbone of call centers for many important hospitals, cab companies, restaurant chains, and online food ordering companies in India. Suddenly, it found about one-third of all the company’s call center lines dead.

Everyone thought it to be a massive technical failure and informed the telecoms operator whom all those numbers belonged to. After an hour the operator got back saying it was the government of India which had ordered to shut the lines for the startup.

Meanwhile, customers panicked. Some of them were large hospitals – who run services such as instant SMSes and calls to doctors if a patient’s condition becomes critical.

“We lost a bunch of businesses, because our patrons kept trying our hotline number and it did not connect,” says Rushabh Vohra of Mr. Homecare, a cleaning service startup.

The 170 employees of Knowlarity decided to stay back all night in the office, struggling to reroute the lines to other operators. But the numbers given to the customers could not be changed instantly.

Knowlarity employees were eating and sleeping in office.

Next day, 37-year old Ambarish went to the department of telecoms in New Delhi, which controls all telcos in India, to seek clarity on why his company was singled out.

Other companies such as JustDial, Sulekha, and others also run call conferencing services.

Lines were restored for a day but then cut again

Here is how call centers work: A customer calls on a certain number and the system forwards the call to various numbers depending upon which one is free. Thus an incoming and outgoing call happens simultaneously.

Ambarish was told that Knowlarity was violating the AudioTex license of 1995, which doesn’t allow two calls to happen at the same time. And since the company was the biggest in this space, its lines were cut, without notice!

Ambarish had no choice but to approach a government tribunal next day. The court ruled in favour of Knowlarity and ordered a stay.

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