Skip to main content

Spectrum: will it be windfall now?

The ‘real excitement’ in the auction will be from today

The bidding trend on the first day of auction on Monday makes experts believe that the Union government would collect well above the expected Rs.11,000-Rs.12,000 crore for the 385-MHz spectrum in the 1,800-MHz band and 46 MHz in the 900-MHz band. Aggressive bidding is taking place for the 900-MHz band in three circles.
The total target, which includes a one-time spectrum charge and the annual regular licence fee, has been set at over Rs. 40,000 crore.
“The heartening news for the government is that it got bidders for all the spectrum that has been put on sale. The auction process will now gain momentum, particularly once the bidding for Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata is settled. On the first day, the bidding companies gauge the mood of their competitors and decide how to spend the money they have kept for bidding … The real excitement will be from tomorrow,” said a senior Department of Telecom official.
Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata are crucial for old GSM players such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone India, whose licence for these circles expires in November this year. With the Telecom Department and the Supreme Court not listening to their pleas to renew their licences without auction, they have no option but to bid aggressively to save their services in these circles.
The government is conducting the auction following a Supreme Court order in the 2G case. The auction is likely to continue for four or five days. The successful 3G spectrum auction in 2010, by which the government earned over Rs. 65,000 crore, lasted 34 days, but the much-hyped bidding in November 2012 lasted just two days with the government earning Rs. 9,407 crore against the expected collection of Rs. 28,000 crore. In the bidding in March 2013, only Sistema Shyam Teleservices, a CDMA operator, bought radio waves estimated at Rs. 3,600 crore in eight of the 22 telecom circles.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SC asks Centre to strike a balance on Rohingya issue (.hindu)

Supreme Court orally indicates that the government should not deport Rohingya “now” as the Centre prevails over it to not record any such views in its formal order, citing “international ramifications”. The Supreme Court on Friday came close to ordering the government not to deport the Rohingya. It finally settled on merely observing that a balance should be struck between humanitarian concern for the community and the country's national security and economic interests. The court was hearing a bunch of petitions, one filed by persons within the Rohingya community, against a proposed move to deport over 40,000 Rohingya refugees. A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, began by orally indicating that the government should not deport Rohingya “now”, but the government prevailed on the court to not pass any formal order, citing “international ramifications”. With this, the status quo continues even though the court gave the community liberty to approach i...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

"ISRO has capabilities to build geostationary satellites for air quality monitoring” (downtoearth)

Pawan Gupta's findings on trans-boundary movement of pollution (Punjab to Delhi) from biomass burning in 2015 spurred debates. He participated in discussions with Indian regulators early September at the Better Air Quality Conference in Busan on the advantages of using satellite data for air quality monitoring. He explains to Down to Earth how air quality monitoring is done using satellite data. How is satellite data used to measure air pollution? Satellites that provide information on atmospheric pollutants are normally (not always) in the low earth orbits (400-1000 km above the Earth’s surface). A single satellite can carry one or more remote sensing instruments onboard that look down to earth and obtain information about the object in the field of view of satellite sensor. The Earth receives electromagnetic radiation from the sun, which travels through space and reaches the earth-atmosphere system. The radiation then interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface...
1 comment
Click Here To Read more »

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »