The commission's directions follow similar action against cellular service providers in the metro circles.

Faced with a substantial decrease in revenues of department of telecom and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd, the Telecom Commission has said that a major mop-up drive must be carried out by DoT state circles.

As a result of the failure of a number of circles to provide information on the dues, even the commission is in the dark about the exact amount recoverable. In fact, it apprehends that "certain units may not be recovering the dues at all". As per the commission figures, close to Rs 18 crore are recoverable from cellular operators alone in 10 circles. In addition, basic service providers and radio paging operators also owe money to the department.

While a sum of Rs 120 lakh is recoverable from paging companies, the commission has no figures on the three functional basic service providers - Bharti Enterprises in Madhya Pradesh, Hughes Ispat in Maharshtra and Tata Teleservices in Andhra Pradesh.

The actual amount is likely to be much more as there is no data available from 12 major circles including Gujarat, Maharshtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, UP East and even MTNL, Mumbai.

Sources added that the despite instructions issued repeatedly since March 1997, private operators had failed to honour the commitments. Sources said that the Telecom Commission's concern had also been prompted by the fact that state telecom circles who have managed to collect sum dues, the recovery has been very poor.

The dues relate to a number of facilities that DoT / MTNL provide to private operators for running services. These include charges on account of roaming facility, interconnect charge, access charge, rent for PCM links, termination charges of 54,100 per annum, point of interconnect (PoI) among other fees.

Sources attributed the delays to the practice of licence fees and liquidated damages (LDs) being recovered centrally by DoT headquarters in Delhi, while the above charges are to be recovered by DoT and MTNL field units.