Recently Government announced the auction of 2G spectrums that will be around on March 2013 and for sought out a June 2 deadline when Supreme Court judgement to cancel 122 licenses will stand quashed, government moved the Supreme Court on Thursday.
Last month, the Supreme Court directed on its landmark judgement to cancel 122 telecommunications licences awarded to companies in 2008 and said, they would need to transfer to other operators within the next four months.
But the Government says that it will take at least 400 days to complete a fresh auction of licences that will put impact over more than 69 million of the 900 million Indian subscribers.
Therefore Govt. asked clarification from SC over its judegement, so that it will decide its any further action for auction.
Requesting SC to sought extension of time line, Govt. said, “It is stated that the planning and execution of the 2G spectrum auction would be a far more complicated task because while the 3G spectrum auction was a green field exercise starting with a clean slate and no incumbents offering 3G services, the 2G auction will have to deal with both legacy issues as well as issues arising out of policy decision.”
Speaking about losing cost of India’s biggest corruption scandal to the country around $40bn (£24.5bn), Govt. admitted in its application that it was impossible for it to conduct [an] auction in four months by 2 June, the deadline set by the court as more than 69 million mobile phone subscribers – 7.5% of total subscribers could face service disruption.
If SC shift 69 millions users to other mobile operators, then it will be difficult for govt. later to handle the additional traffic given their technical and operational constraints.
