The licence fee-based bidding system had rendered a large number of projects unviable and hence DoT was considering an alternate system of bidding, he said.

Speaking to the media here at a seminar on telecommunications, he said the department was mulling over a revenue-sharing or a combination of fixed-fee and revenue-sharing as alternatives to the licence-fee system.

Other fundamental changes like tenure of the licence and period of implementation of the project also needed to be revised, Gokak said. "I will sound the government and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on the idea, he added.

While this would be the outlook for the future, it would be difficult to rework or adjust the licence arrangements for the circles already tendered for both cellular and basic services, hesaid.

Commenting on the ICICI study commisssioned by DoT on the cellular industry, he said the report had been submitted and the recommendations were under consideration. Any question of the licence period would, however, be considered only after the Bureau of Indian Costs and Prices (BICP) submitted its report, he added.

Gokak also said that the corporatisation of DoT was being considered by the government and that ``the response was very encouraging.''

On measures taken by DoT to encourage domestically developed technologies like the CorDect system developed by IIT, Chennai, he said adequate measures will be taken to promote domestic technology. He also mentioned that an experiment was on to integrate the IIT technology with a C-DoT technology for rural telephony.

The issue of providing a higher bandwidth for IIT's WLL technology had been sorted out by DoT.