The Centre's application filed in the Supreme Court on Thursday seeking a clarification on devising appropriate procedures for the auction of 2G licences said the government had attempted to draw up as expeditious a timeline as possible and the estimated time for conduct of this auction was significantly lower than the 1,560 days taken to conduct the 3G auction.
While annexing the detailed chart, explaining the steps involved in the auctioning process, the time taken to accomplish the steps, the Department of Telecommunications said the planning and execution of the 2G spectrum auction would be a far more complicated task because while the 3G spectrum auction was a green field exercise starting with a clean slate and no incumbents offering 3G services, the 2G auction would have to deal with both legacy issues as well as issues arising out of policy decisions.
The 2G auction would entail devising appropriate procedures in the light of specific facts of 2G telecom services, and the procedures adopted for the 3G auction could not be adopted in toto .
“It is expected that the auction process will take at least 400 days and accordingly, the new licences for spectrum can be issued only in or around March 2013,” the petition said.
As the licences stood quashed and new licences could be issued only around March next year, there would be an inevitable disruption in services for the 69 million subscribers, representing almost 75 per cent of the total mobile subscribers in India, who would be indirectly affected by the court ruling.
The petition sought a clarification whether the auction could be conducted in accordance with the judgment.
