The one-man committee of retired Supreme Court judge Shivraj V. Patil has found that there were procedural lapses in the formulation of spectrum allocation polices and issuance of new licences since 2001, when the NDA government was in office, till 2008, when the 2G scam hit the headlines, according to selective excerpts of the report released on Friday.
Communications minister Kapil Sibal told reporters that his ministry would forward the report’s findings to the CBI for investigation. This could mean that besides former communications minister A. Raja, ministers who held office during the NDA government could also come under the scanner of the investigating agencies. The report has also outlined as “procedural lapses” two decisions for which Mr Raja has got into trouble: arbitrarily changing the cut-off date for receiving applications for new 2G licences in 2007, and changing the first-come-first-served policy.
“The conclusion of the one-man committee is that whether it was 2003 or 2004 or 2007, whatever decisions were taken were not only procedurally wrong but were also against the Cabinet decision of October 2003. All allotment of spectrum right from 2003 till date was wrong. The people who are making allegations, they started all this,” said Mr Sibal. In October 2003, the Union Cabinet had accepted Trai’s recommendation that new players must be introduced through a multi-stage bidding process.
Mr Sibal said the committee concluded that the first-come-first-served policy adopted by the NDA government in 2003 was against this Cabinet decision. “The decision (in 2003) that the price discovered for the fourth operator will be the entry fee for future licences was against the Cabinet decision. The spectrum should not have come bundled with licence. The decisions which were taken were never done by taking the nod (of the) full Telecom Commission,” Mr Sibal said.
The report said if the Trai recommendation was not acceptable to the department of telecom, the matter should have been referred back to the telecom regulator.
The report said the telecom department order in 2001 on formulating procedures for allotment of additional spectrum over and above the start-up spectrum of 4.4MHz “was opposed to the policy mandate requiring optimum utilisation of spectrum.”
Some 16 specific instances of lack of fairness and transparency in the procedure adopted by the department of telecom in granting licences and allotment of spectrum in 2001-09 have been reported by the committee. The report noted 37 cases of lapses by way of omission and commission by various individuals, including ministers, secretaries and other officials, in various government decisions in 2001-09 over grant of licences and allocation of spectrum. Most of these relate to the periods 2003-04 and 2007-08.
“The question that will now arise is that the ministers who were in the Cabinet... how (did) they allow it? Why was there was no investigation at that time? How were these wrong decisions taken, and why did the bureaucracy follow it? These are serious questions, and maybe in the coming days the people who are making allegations today may have to give answers,” said Mr Sibal. The minister refused to mention any names, saying everyone should first be given an opportunity to give their point of view.
When asked about Mr Raja claiming he had followed his predecessors, Mr Sibal said: “Raja always said that he followed past policies, and the past policies were themselves wrong.”
The BJP, meanwhile, said the report was an attempt to bail out the former communications minister. The party insisted that only a JPC probe could bring out the truth. It said it would give a comprehensive response after going through the entire report. Said BJP spokesperson Ravishankar Prasad: “The NDA has nothing to hide. We ourselves have said let a JPC examine every allocation from 1998 itself.” He said the NDA was proud of “revolutionising” the telecom sector and mobile telephony. “The entire queue (of telephone connection seekers) was done away with. Incoming calls, which used to be charged at `16 per minute, became almost negligible. In the revenue-sharing system, the number of players gave more money to the government than licence fees because the entire area expanded and mobile phones became affordable for the poor,” Mr Prasad added.