Cost of corruption in telecom department

Delays and dilutions cost Govt Rs 50,000 cr

TELECOM TALE.

Thomas K. Thomas

New Delhi, March 11 Delays and wrong decisions by the Department of Telecommunications have cost India almost Rs 50,000 crore of revenue.

The delay in going through with the auction for 3G and WiMax spectrum has cost the government close to Rs 30,000 crore. This is because the DoT took more than two years to firm up the policy. As a result, it did not have enough time to get the Cabinet approval.

In addition, according to the DoT itself, the Government would have earned another Rs 5,000 crore had the DoT implemented its proposals to raise spectrum charges. In November 2008, the DoT had decided to impose a one-time fee on all telecom companies that held radio frequencies beyond 6.2 Mhz. However, the decision was not implemented.

In the same month, the DoT declared that spectrum usage charges for all existing telecom companies would be increased by 2 per cent across the board. It had said that this would translate to an income of Rs 1,000 crore to the Centre. The new charge was to be effective from January 1, but it has not been implemented till now.

The decision to go ahead with the ‘first-come, first-served’ policy on spectrum allocation earned Rs 10,000 crore. An auction would have fetched at least twice as much.
Roll-out dilution

The DoT could have earned another Rs 500 crore if it had gone ahead with its decision to impose penalty on operators failing to meet the roll-out obligations. Instead of penalising the operators, the DoT diluted the roll-out norms.

Add to this, the revenue the Government would have got if it had started issuing licences to Mobile Virtual Network Operators and got the new mobile players to start paying revenue share by launching the service; the country’s economy would have been stronger.