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There has been no spectrum allocation without an auction, according to Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister for Information Technology, Law and Justice and Electronics.
Prasad was reacting to a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) pointing out that there has been spectrum allocation to a company on the first-come-first (FCFS) basis.
Interestingly, the CAG neither mentioned the name of the operator to which the microwave spectrum was allocated nor the loss estimates.
However, it mentioned that the government suffered an adverse financial impact of around ₹560 crore due to various instances of spectrum mismanagement by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).
Prasad was the Telecom Minister at that point in time — when the spectrum was allocated to the said operator on a first-come-first basis — in 2015.
“From the day I took over (in May 2014), every spectrum was allocated through auctions to the best of my knowledge,” Prasad said on the sidelines of an event here when asked about the alleged anomaly.
MWA spectrum
The CAG — in its report tabled in Parliament on Tuesday — said that a set of microwave access (MWA) spectrum was allocated to a telecom operator on first-cum-first-service basis in contravention of the recommendations of a committee, while 101 applications for microwave spectrum were pending with the government. The report said that DoT constituted a committee in December 2012, to look into the allotment of spectrum in various categories of spectrum users, and proposed that the spectrum allotment in microwave band be done through an auction which is a market-related process.
“However, in contravention of the committee’s recommendations, allocation of MW access spectrum has been done on FCFS basis till date as was being done for 2G licence and access spectrum till 2009," the report said.
The Supreme Court, in 2012, had struck down the FCFS policy in 2G spectrum allocation while cancelling 122 telecom licences underwhich spectrum was allocated.
Prasad inaugurated the National Informatics Centre’s (NIC) new Command and Control Centre which will be a single-window solution for monitoring, troubleshooting and offering technical support for cloud and data centre infrastructure.
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