After handing over the charge of the telecom ministry to Mr Kapil Sibal, the government in the Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed to be quietly “distancing” itself from certain controversial decisions of former minister A. Raja, especially the advancing of the cut-off date for the allotment of 2G spectrum licences.
While opening arguments on behalf of the department of telecom before a bench of Justices G.S. Singhvi and A.K. Ganguly, Solicitor-General Gopal Subramaniam stated that he would not like to mix-up the issue of “preponing” of the date in his argument on the spectrum allocation policy.
“Preponing the date could be dealt with separately,” Mr Subramaniam said while detailing how the spectrum licensing policy had evolved since 1999 when the government had allowed migration to private players from “licence fee” to “revenue sharing” regime.
The attempt to separate the issue of “advancing” the cut-off date by Mr Raja from October 1, 2007 to September 25, 2007 as the main eligibility criteria, had straightaway filtered out 343 applicants of 575 with one stroke and Mr Raja consequently had also changed the rules for issuing the letter of intent to the remaining applicants, of whom several applicants were quite new to telecom sector.
The top court expressed surprise over the sudden decision on the advancing cut-off date, with the bench observing “it is very strange that no advertisement was given on September 24, 2007 for fixing the cut-off date receiving applications despite the fact that every one in DoT knew that spectrum was a finite asset.”
“If it (spectrum) was such a scarce commodity why was further cut-off date fixed?” the court asked pointing out the PM was informed only in November about the change of cut-off date again.