The FINANCIAL -- Tata Teleservices welcomes the Hon'ble Supreme Court’s judgment that spectrum, a scarce national resource, will be allotted through auctions. According to Tata, it has always been our view that spectrum has value and should be paid for.

The aberrations in the policy date back to 2001 and have resulted in wrongful allocations, the beneficiaries of which were not before the court. If auction covers spectrum wrongfully allocated since 2001 and is executed in an equitable manner, without bias in favour of selected operators or specific technologies, it should bring in greater transparency and fair-play into the telecom industry.

It is obvious that in the new dispensation mandated by the Supreme Court to be put in place within four months, there has to be a level playing field consistent with the paradigm of transparency.

At the time when NTT Docomo invested in TTL, TTL had been in operation for over 12 years, already had 17 licences, had reached an annual turnover of Rs6,000 crore, had 3,000 employees, about 100 offices, 33 million subscribers, 60,000km of fibre, an NLD business, 38 per cent investments in Tata Teleservices and 100 per cent investments in its tower subsidiary.

The clubbing of TTL with two licensees who had just entered the telecom business from the real estate sector appears to have also overlooked this and the fact that only three new licences were granted to TTL in January 2008, that these were for Assam, North East, and Jammu and Kashmir, and most of all, these were CDMA licences.

The investment made by its strategic partner NTT Docomo was, therefore, not on account of these three licences but on account of TTL’s established position as one of the strong players in the telecom field, apart from its strong Tata brand.

TTL had applied for these three licences way back in June 2006 and this was kept pending for over 18 months until LOIs were finally issued in January 2008.

TTL has been advised to file a review petition in the Supreme Court seeking redressal on this point.

Related Stories

• OPEC spare capacity in the first quarter of 2012 at lowest level since 2008
• Scion tC Receives Autobytel and AutoPacific 2012 Vehicle Satisfaction Award
• Two new board members in Hydro