New Delhi, August 2
The name of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was today dragged into the 2G Spectrum allocation scam as a former Telecom Secretary during the NDA regime told the joint parliamentary committee (JPC) that the BJP statesman was holding the charge of the ministry when the Cabinet cleared the migration policy.

Anil Kumar, who was the Telecom Secretary between 1998 and 2000, told the JPC that the key Cabinet decision on migration policy was taken when Vajpayee held charge of the communication ministry briefly in 1999 after the exit of Jagmohan.

The JPC, headed by Congress MP PC Chacko, has been holding daily meetings to dig into the circumstances leading to the scam and has been looking into the telecom policy of the BJP-led NDA government. It questioned Anil Kumar for over two hours.

The details about Anil Kumar’s deposition were given to the media by Chacko after the meeting late in the evening.

Briefing newsmen, Chacko said Anil Kumar had defended the migration policy, saying the decision had to be taken in the “best interests” of the telecom sector and the benefits of the policy were felt in the country now in the form of consumer-friendly tariffs.

He said the Cabinet approval in 1999 to the telecom migration policy came despite Jagmohan and then Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha putting in dissenting note to the proposal.

External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh was heading a group of ministers on telecom then, he said.

The migration policy had allowed cellular operators to shift from fixed licence fee regime to the revenue-sharing model. The Department of Telecom (DoT) has informed the JPC that the exchequer lost over Rs.43,523.92 crore due to the migration policy.