Does it take 3 days to activate sim card?

[Faysal Said]

After getting an Aircel prepaid sim card, I noticed that it does not allow me to call outside of India. Being a foreigner, it is important that I call my relatives/families. So I quickly decided to pursue Airtel.
Once I given all the paperwork and documents, they notified me that it will take 3 business days to activate the sim card. I thought it was ridiculous since Aircel only took 5 minutes. When I asked why takes so long, they told me it was because the company needed to verify if the documents are genuine.
Is this really how Airtel works?

 

[chetan31]

customer hungry operators like reliance, docomo, aircel,bsnl does it on the spot, they are disobeying the dot directives.
airtel, vodafone, idea takes minimum 48 hrs to 72 hrs to activate. they are genuinely following DOT guideliness to verify the docs first, do physical verfication in case of postpaid and then activate. they also wants to escape heavy penalties from DOT