3G auction to be held on 9 April, says government

India will hold the much-delayed bandwidth auctions for third generation spectrum on 9 April, the government said on Wednesday. The 3G spectrum will allow telecom operators to offer high-speed voice and data applications.  

The government will invite applications from prospective bidders from 25 February and the last day for submitting bids is 19 March. It will announce the pre-qualified bidders on 30 March and hold mock auctions on 5 and 6 April, an official statement said.  

An auction for broadband wireless access services will be held two days after the completion of 3G bandwidth auctions.  

The auctions have already been deferred thrice since they were first set for 16 January 2009, over issues such as a higher starting price, the number of slots to be sold and availability of bandwidth. However, telecommunications minister Andimuthu Raja had said on Monday that the issues had been resolved. 

The government statement on Wednesday, 24 Februaury, did not give any details of the auctions. But according to the details issued in December, the government had set Rs3,500 crore as the starting auction price for one slot of bandwidth. 

The auctions would be held for 20 of India's 22 telecoms zones and four slots are available for most of the zones. These four slots were to be in addition to those already allotted to state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. In some zones, such as Delhi and Gujarat, only two slots are available due to scarcity of available spectrum.