Sibal revealed selective details of the recent report submitted by former Supreme Court judge Shivaraj Patil to reporters.
A week after lauding the ‘first come first served’ policy for lowering telecom tariffs and taking telecom penetration to 62%, telecom minister Kapil Sibal on Friday blamed the policy for the “problems” of the telecom sector. The policy was put in place by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in 2003.
“Former minister A Raja has always said that we are not deviating from the old policies. But the problem was that the old policy itself was wrong,” Sibal said at a press conference. Raja is currently in CBI custody for allegedly manipulating the policy to favour certain telecom companies.
Sibal revealed selective details of the recent report submitted by former Supreme Court judge Shivaraj Patil to reporters.
Asked why he defended the policy a week ago, Sibal said he was not saying that the principle of the policy was wrong, but only that the policy was “procedurally” wrong. Since the ‘first come, first served’ policy was procedurally wrong, all allocations of spectrum and licenses since 2001 was wrong, he added. He, however, did not say whether he will take action against all the licensees who got their licenses since 2003.
The Patil report has found Raja guilty of manipulating the policy by arbitrarily choosing to advance the cut off date for receiving telecom applications from October 1, 2007 to September 25, 2007.
“The procedure formulated, whereby the processing of applications… was restricted only to [those] received up to 25.09.2007.. is not traceable to either powers vested in terms of any procedure laid out or satisfies the requisites of law, in particular, the principles of objectivity, fairness or transparency,” the report says. It also zeroes in on individuals for “procedural” violations, but Sibal said he cannot make the details public.
Sibal quoted parts of the judge’s report which were critical of the BJP government in an effort to blunt opposition attack over the 2G scam. Quoting from the report, Sibal said, “On 24.11.2003, the [NDA] minister approved the formulation.. of `first come, first served’ as against the multi-stage bidding process [of 2001]. All this was clearly in deviation of extant policies..”
He said if Raja is being blamed for conspiracy in awarding licenses, the then telecom minister Arun Shourie must also take the blame for replacing the auction policy with the ‘first come, first served’ policy.
Rajiv Pratap Rudy, BJP spokesperson, dismissed Sibal’s claim. “Let us have a joint parliamentary committee enquiry and we can clear it all up,” said, adding: “let him set the CBI to have us arrested.”
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