The government is expected to take stock of the available legal options tomorrow against the Supreme Court order cancelling 122 licences for mobile networks issued in January 2008.
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is expected to head the meeting, which will be attended by Communications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal, Planning Commission Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Pulok Chaterjee and Law Minister Salman Khurshid.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has already conducted two meetings to understand the implications of the SC order on the telecom sector and the overall impact on foreign direct investments. Home Minister P Chidambaram, Attorney General G E Vahanvati and Telecom Secretary R Chandrashekhar had attended at least one of the earlier meetings.
The department of telecommunications has already sought the AG’s view on cancellation of the licences issued before 2008 on the basis of first-come-first-served policy.
Besides, the dual-technology licence awarded in August 2007 to Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices and financial implications if the licence fee of all the cancelled licences has to be refunded.
The cancelled 122 licences and dual-technology licences were issued by the then telecom minister, A Raja, who is now undergoing trial in the alleged 2G spectrum scam. The SC order had also directed Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to frame new rules for licences and auctioning of spectrum.
Trai has already floated a pre-consultation paper for framing the new norms and asking for comments from all stakeholders.
The companies that were impacted by the SC order include Uninor, Sistema Shyam, Loop, Videocon, Idea, Tata Teleservices, STel and Etisalat DB.
Out of these, Uninor, a joint venture between Norway’s Telenor and Unitech Group; and Sistema Shyam, a venture between Russia’s Sistema and Shyam group, have invested close to about Rs 28,000 crore and were considered to be the new serious telecom entrants.
