Telecom minister A Raja disregarded the Prime Minister’s November 2007 suggestion to auction 2G spectrum, FE reported on Wednesday. The controversial minister also defied a similar and concurrent advice from the law ministry, as is evident from copy of the inter-ministerial correspondence in FE’s possession. Raja had even shot off a complaint to the prime minister himself about the impropriety of law ministry’s proposal that an empowered group of ministers (eGoM) be set up to decide on the spectrum allocation.
On November 1, 2007, responding to a DoT note seeking law ministry’s views on possible alternatives to grant licences, the then law minister HR Bhardwaj had noted: “In view of the importance of the case and various options indicated in the statement of the case, it is necessary that the whole issue is first considered by an empowered group of ministers and in that process, legal opinion of AG can be obtained.”
Raja wrote to the PM the next day that the advice was not acceptable to him since the matter was not inter-departmental. “The department wanted to examine the possibility of any other procedure in addition to the current procedure of allotment of licences to process the huge number of applications. A few alternative procedures as debated in the department and also opined by a few legal experts were suggested by the DoT to ministry of law and justice to examine its legal tenability to avoid future legal complications, if any.”
Raja further wrote complainingly: “The ministry of law and justice, instead of examining the legal tenability of these alternative procedures, suggested referring the matter to an eGoM. Since, generally new major policy decisions of a department or inter-departmental issues are referred to GoM, and needless to say that the present issue related to procedures, the suggestion of law ministry is totally out of context.”
Interestingly, the same day, the PM wrote to Raja, as reported by FE on May 26. “In order that spectrum use efficiency gets directly linked with correct pricing of spectrum, consider (i) introduction of a transparent methodology of auction, wherever legally and technically feasible, and (ii) revision of entry fee, which is currently benchmarked on old spectrum auction figures,” the PM had written. Raja however granted licences to eight firms, and in the process also allegedly committed several irregularities.
Source: Report by Anandita Singh Mankotia, Rishi Raj published in Financial Express
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