Finance
Minister P Chidambaram on Thursday said the Cabinet has approved the
recommendation of an Empowered Group of Ministers that GSM-based telecom
operators be asked to pay for airwaves they hold beyond 4.4 Mega-Hertz
at an auction-determined price, while CDMA carriers pay for holdings
beyond 2.5 MHz, for the remaining validity of their permits.
GSM-operators holding more than 6.2 MHz of spectrum will pay a retroactive fee for the airwaves from July 2008.
Chidambaram said while the price discovered in the auction beginning 12th
November will apply for the one-time fee to be charged from incumbent
GSM operators, the Department of Telecom (DoT) will work out the basis
for the same for CDMA carriers.
This is because there is no bidder for CDMA auction now and so there will be no auction determined price, he said.
"Similar
recommendations (of auction determined price being levied) were made
for CDMA but there has been subsequent developments since the EGoM
meeting that bidders who had evinced interest for CDMA auction have
withdrawn from the auction. Therefore there is no auction now for the
CDMA," he said.
"DoT has been requested to come back to the Cabinet regarding implementation of the decision regarding CDMA," he added.
The
government had planned to hold two separate auctions for spectrum used
by GSM and CDMA-based mobile phone carriers hoping to reap a combined Rs
40,000 crore revenue.
It
has set a base price of Rs 14,000 crore for 5 MHz of a pan-India GSM
spectrum, more than seven times what companies paid in 2008 to get
telecom licenses. For CDMA, the base price was set at 1.3 times the GSM
airwaves.
However,
no bidder is left in fray for CDMA auction after Tata Teleservices and
Videocon Telecommunications withdrew from the sale.
Chidambaram
said licensees "will be given an option to surrender spectrum beyond
4.4 MHz for GSM" if they don't want the one-time fee.
Also, payments can be made in monthly instalments at 9.75 percent interest rate.
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