The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) plans to issue demand notice to operators, whose licences were cancelled by the Supreme Court in February, 2012.
The Supreme Court had cancelled 122 2G licences during February 2012, however it allowed service providers to continue providing services till the completion of next spectrum auction. Later in 2013, the apex court had asked the government to charge fees from companies that continued operations even after cancellation of their licences.
Initially, DoT had estimated collecting Rs 27.64 billion, including basic fee, fine and interest from nine telecom operators. The department had plans of collecting fees from operators for the period between February 2, 2012 and February 15, 2013.
However, DoT is recalculating the amount to be collected from each operator on the basis of closure of operations by each service provider. According to previous estimates of DoT, liability of Sistema Shyam TeleServices Limited (SSTL) amounted to Rs 4.63 billion, Uninor Rs 5.13 billion, Idea Cellular Rs 1.62 billion, Loop Telecom Rs 3.89 billion and S Tel Rs 0.17 billion.
Other players including Spice Communications (acquired by Idea Cellular) had to pay Rs 1.08 billion, Tata Teleservices Limited (Rs 0.03 billion), Videocon Telecommunications (Rs 5.01 billion) and Etisalat DB (Rs 6.05 billion).
Majority of these operators, except SSTL, closed or scaled down their operations before February 15, 2013.
