SC extends spectrum auction deadline by 3 months

The Supreme Court on Tuesday extended its deadline for the auction of 122 cancelled 2G telecom licences and spectrum from 2 June to 31 August and said holders of the cancelled licences could continue to provide services till 7 September; while rejecting a petition by the department of telecommunications (DoT) for a 400-day extension.

The move affects 69 million mobile phone subscribers in 22 telecom circles where companies with cancelled licences operate. In a ruling early this year, the apex court had cancelled all licences awarded after January 2008, during the tenure of tainted and jailed former telecom minister Andimuthu Raja.

''In our view, it will be just and proper to partially accept the averments made in the application (by the DoT),'' a two-member bench comprising Justices G S Singhvi and K S Radhakrishnan said. ''Accordingly, the time specified for conducting the auction and grant of licences is extended up to 31 August 2012.''

The bench further said there should be no break in mobile services for users, as the new licensees would take over the operations in the concerned telecom circle from the old ones within a week between 1 and 7 September without any disruption in connectivity.

On its cancellation of the 2G licences allotted during the tenure of then telecom minister A Raja on an apparently ad hoc basis, the bench said the union government in its review petition rightly took the stand that it was not seeking reconsideration of the judgment cancelling the licences.

"There is data now available, which shows the price of per MHz of spectrum at that time was somewhere around Rs1,600 crore, which meant each licensee having 4.4 MHz spectrum bandwidth should have paid Rs7,000 crore [when actually they paid far less]. The officials of the government are not so naive as not to understand this. The government too was aware that something had gone wrong. That is why it is not questioning the cancellation order," it said.