Raja lashes out at babus, rules out entry fee change

Attempt to clear the air on unified access service licence guidelines.

Communications Minister A Raja has made it clear to bureaucrats in his ministry that there is no question of any change in the entry fee to be paid by a company for getting a unified access service licence (UASL), which allows an operator to offer mobile and fixed line services.

In an unusually strong hand-written noting (not the first time that the 42-year old lawyer turned politician has done so) on a file relating to licences and related issues, Raja castigated senior officials in the Telecom Commission.

"These type of continuous confusions observed on the file, whoever be the officer concerned, do not show any legitimacy and integrity, but only their vested interests," he said. Raja's ire was particularly targeted at a member of the Telecom Commission (TC), a body that determines telecom policy and is chaired by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) Secretary. He has also taken to task a director in the department.

"It appears from the notings that the concerned officials neither have up-to-date knowledge of UASL guidelines nor have bothered to carefully go through the file", Raja said, adding that the suggestions made by the officials "are not factually correct and as such they should be ignored".

The suggestion here is one where the DoT director had said the date of priority for allotment of spectrum should be the same as the date of the application and that the department should indicate an approximate time within which the operator would get spectrum.

Raja also pointed out that the matter of entry fee has been deliberated within DoT several times, taking into account departmental guidelines and recommendations of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. "Accordingly, a decision has been taken that entry fee need not be revised", he added.

Raja's decisive intervention on the matter on December 4 came in the light of strong demands by various sections including key finance ministry officials, seeking a hike in the entry fee applicable to a UASL licence.

A nationwide licence costs Rs 1,651 crore, a price that was determined in 2001. However, a key policy change in this regard is that from now on, new licences will not come bundled with spectrum which will be subject to availability. Recently, leading mobile operator Bharti Airtel offered to pay Rs 2,650 crore for spectrum of 4.4 Mhz nationwide, while another existing GSM mobile operator stuck to the Rs 1,651 crore price.

In response to a recommendation by the TC's Member (Finance) that the UASL entry fee had not been revised for some years now and needed to be examined in depth, Raja said: "Secretary Telecom (DS Mathur) has already replied on these lines to Finance Secretary (D. Subbarao) letter.

Member (Finance) should have checked the facts before putting up the note on file".

Finally, Raja ordered that the process of awarding fresh licenses, which has been held up for some time, be implemented to eligible applicants. That process is currently on and letters of intent may be issued to several of the eligible applicants. There are 46 companies in the fray, of which around 23 are being considered in the first phase.