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A Tribune Special Girja Shankar Kaura Tribune News Service New Delhi , February 8 This has emerged in the report of the Shivraj V Patil panel that went into the lapses made during the allocation of the 2G Spectrum. The report, presented to Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal last week, said that all decisions on Spectrum allocation since 2003 by successive governments, including the UPA regime, were procedurally wrong. As said by Sibal, when he put forward the details of the report last week, the Telecom Ministry had already submitted the report to the CBI for further action. What is interesting that has emerged in the one-man committee report is that the telecom sector regulator TRAI suggested the deviation from the Cabinet decision, which has eventually led to Raja following the laid down procedure and allocating Spectrum to the new operators in 2008. The country’s top audit body, Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), has put the resultant loss to the national exchequer at a presumptive Rs 1.76 lakh crore, leading to the ouster of Raja from the Telecom Ministry and his eventual arrest by the CBI. It has emerged that the Union Cabinet in its meeting of October 31, 2003, cleared the approvals sought by the Telecom Ministry where it laid down procedure for the introduction of new players in the telecom sector. The TRAI had in a suo moto recommendation on October 27, 2003, said that additional players could be introduced through multi-stage bidding process, which was accepted by the Union Cabinet in its meeting on October 31, 2003.But, the then TRAI chairman, in a letter to the then secretary, Department of Telecom (DoT), suggested that the entry fee for the new UASL licencee would be the existing entry fee of the fourth cellular operator in an area. The letter dated November 14, 2003, referred to his “telecon” with the DoT secretary on the matter. The one-man committee points out that as a result the DoT secretary deviated from the Cabinet decision and on November 17, 2003, approved the formulation of the procedure of accepting applications for the grant of UASLs by adopting a procedure similar to the one adopted for the grant of basic service licencee (BSL). The report further says that on November 23, 2003, the then minister approved the formulation for grant of UASLs on the basis of “first come first serve” as against through multi-stage bidding process approved by the Union Cabinet then. “The DoT contrary to the said recommendations formulated the procedure on November 24, 2003, to collect entry fee from new operators at the rate paid by the fourth operators (which was just about Rs 1,600 crore), thus deviating from the policy framework of the National Telecom Policy 1999,” the report said. It has also emerged that the telecom operators were granted additional Spectrum without any payment to the national exchequer but were asked to pay just one per cent and then two per cent of the adjusted gross revenue (AGR) as Spectrum charge, which turned out to be very low. The Patil committee has opined that this additional Spectrum was granted to the telecom operators without clearance from the Telecom Commission.
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