In a written reply to the Lok Sabha, Milind Deora, Minister of State for Communication and IT said that by shifting telecom operators from the fixed licence fee regime to revenue-sharing model in 1999, the NDA government caused a loss of over Rs 435.23 billion, owing to lower licence fees.
Deora added that as per the fixed licence fee, operators would have paid Rs 583.54 billion but the fee collected from them over their licence period has been Rs 148.30 billion, due to the migration package.
Thus, the impact on licence fee collections due to the migration package offered vide NTP 99 for mobile and basic service providers is Rs 435.23 billion.
Deora said, “The migration package was a one-time measure to migrate the licences to the NTP 99 Regime. Subsequent to this, a new category of licence viz. unified access service licenses (UASL) was introduced and most of the basic and mobile licences except BSNL and MTNL migrated to UAS License.?
The UAS licence facilitated telecom operators to provide all telecom services by getting a single licence instead of obtaining different kind of licences for various telecom services like mobile phone, landline phone, STD, ISD, internet and others.
In its report released in 2000, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) had also said that telecom companies having cellular mobile and basic telephone licences in metros and other circles defaulted in making payment of licence fee to the government, leading to mounting dues.
