The Supreme Court order asking the CBI to register separate FIR in respect of issuing spectrums between 2001 and 2007 would cover the award of 159 licences under the Unified Access Service Licence scheme, which will include the NDA regime up to May 2004 when it allowed amalgamation of the technologies for the purpose of granting of the UASLs.
This has emerged from the apex court analysis in its order to show how UASL scheme was formulated during the NDA regime after the telecom regulatory auth-ority of India had issued guidelines in May 2001 and how the GoM recommendation for amending the new telecom policy of 1999 was accepted by the government on October 31, 2003.
The NTP introduced by NDA in 1999 had allowed the service providers to migrate to the licence fee regime making drastic change in the earlier policy of revenue sharing.
“The recommendations of GoM were accepted by the Union cabinet in its meeting held on October 31, 2003. Thereafter, NTP (of) 1999 was amended video office memorandum of November 11, 2003. On the same day, guidelines were issued for the Unified Access (Basic and Cellular) Services License (UASL),” a bench of Justices G.S. Singhvi and A.K. Ganguly in the order recorded.
The top court said Trai in November 2003 had clarified that the entry fee of the new unified licensees would be the entry fee of the fourth cellular operator and in service areas where there was no fourth operator, the entry fee of the existing basic service operators fixed by the government would continue. On January 13, 2005 Trai recommended that till unified licensing comes into effect, the current regime of “spectrum pricing will continue” and telecom services should not be seen as a source of revenue earning for the government. On April 13, 2007 a reference was made to Trai by DoT stating that after finalisation of the UASL policy, 159 licences had been issued for providing “access services” in the country and the telecom service providers were mostly using the “wireless technology”, the top court said. The bench further pointed out that the opinion of Trai was sought on transfer of the licences guidelines of February 21, 2004 by DoT on “mergers and acquisitions” to permit the service providers to offer access service using combination of technologies (CDMA/GSM/Basic) under the “same license and roll out obligations”.
The detailed analysis on these lines and about the award of 159 UASLs up to 2007 assumes significance in the wake of court’s direction No-3 in its seven-fold directives to the CBI, ED and IT department for expediting the probe.
Direction No-3 said “the CBI shall, if it has already not registered FIR in the context of the alleged irregularities committed in the grant of licences from 2001 to 2006-2007, now register a case and conduct thorough investigation with particular emphasis on the loss caused to the public exchequer and corresponding gain to the licensees to the service providers (in the award of spectrums between 2001 and 2007).”