By way of a Notification dated May 05, 2024, the Department of Telecommunications (‘DoT’) has issued additional instructions to Unified License and Unified Access Service License holders (‘Licensees’) for verification of end user business connections (‘Additional Instructions’). These Additional Instructions have been issued in continuation of the instructions issued by the DoT on August 31, 2023, by which, among others, bulk connections were discontinued, and concept of business connections was introduced. These Additional Instructions clarify that in scenarios where end-users are not identifiable in a business connection such as Subscriber Identity Module (‘SIMs’) obtained for research and development, and testing activities for a specified purpose, the requirement of end-user KYC is optional, subject to the additional safeguards being undertaken by Licensees which include the following: (i) the connection must be issued by Licensees’ employees only; (ii) an undertaking should be obtained from the subscribing entity detailing the use case scenarios having no end-users; (iii) bona fide use of such business connections should be monitored; (iv) such connections should be provided with limited call/short message service (‘SMS’)/data facility with a definite validity period of maximum one year at a time based on use case scenarios; and (v) issuance of such connection should be limited to a maximum number of 100 vis-à-vis any given entity at a given time. The re-sale of such SIM cards continues to be prohibited.