The Supreme Court on Monday sought a reply from the Centre and others on a PIL alleging misuse of 2G spectrum licensing conditions by various private operators, including Airtel, Idea Cellular and Vodafone, and causing a huge loss of R36,993 crore to the exchequer.
A bench headed by Justice GS Singhvi sought reply from the finance ministry, DoT, Trai, Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Reliance Telecom, Vodafone Essar and others on the petition filed by Supreme Court lawyer Yakesh Anand pointing out to the possible criminal conspiracy between the officials of DoT, finance ministry and the private operators in distributing the scarce natural resource in an irregular, illegal and non-transparent manner and without charging any additional fee.
“The excess allocation of spectrum benefited the private operators in terms of huge revenue which they were able to earn by getting the natural resource of spectrum without any price and at the cost of national exchequer,” Anand said, while seeking CBI probe into the notional loss on account of spectrum allocation, as reported by the Comptroller and Auditor General, under the apex court’s guidance.
The Delhi High Court had declined to hear Anand’s PIL alleging violation of licence conditions in allocation of 2G spectrum by the telecom ministry, saying that the issue was being monitored by the Supreme Court.
Anand in his petition alleged that DoTdistributed excess amount of “precious and scarce national resource of spectrum” to private telecom operators, without charging any additional fee.
Anand also alleged that the excess spectrum was distributed without any criteria, guidelines and in violation of the licence conditions.
He alleged the DoT did not probe how excess spectrum was allocated to the private telecom service providers, including Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone Essar, Aircel and Spice Telecom.
Anand, in his petition, said that the scarce resource of spectrum was “illegally” distributed to telecom operators without charging any spectrum fee since 1996, which has caused a loss to the tune of around R37,000 crore to the exchequer.
The petition said that a maximum of 4.4 MHz spectrum could be alloted to telecom operators in 1994-95 and 6.2 MHz to those awarded licence after 2001 and any additional spectrum beyond this had to be charged.
It said among private telecom operators, Bharti Airtel has 32.4 MHz additional spectrum in 13 circles, Vodafone Essar Mobile Services has 19.6 MHz in 7 circles, Idea Cellular has 12.6 MHz in 6 circles and BPL, Aircel, Relaince and Spice have 1.6 to 3.8 MHz in one circle. It also said that BSNL and MTNL have 61.6 MHz and 12.4 MHz in 19 and two cirlces, respectively.
Meanwhile, the court will pronounce on Tuesday judgment on Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy?s plea seeking PM’s nod to prosecute ex-telecom minister A Raja in the 2G spectrum scam case.