Trai Chief Questions Need for All Spectrum Allocation to Be via Auction

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) Chairman Rahul Khullar on Wednesday questioned the need to continue to sell all spectrum through auction only for fear of CAG or CBI inquiries, and would rather have airwaves be more easily available.

"Stage is for me to ask ourselves are we going to continue plugging this line that all spectrum must be auctioned. There should be no delicensing because there will be enquiry by CAG or CVC or CBI. Are we in business of building India or [are] we sort of cowards cowering our wounds," he asked while speaking at Assocham's Mobile India Summit.

The CAG had alleged that government in 2008 allocated spectrum at less price which caused the national exchequer a notional loss of about Rs. 1.76 lakh crore. The government had invited all-round criticism on 2G spectrum scam that was probed by CBI.

The government is allocating spectrum for mobile services through auction only after the Supreme Court in February 2012 cancelled 122 2G licence and directed government to allocate spectrum through auction.

The Trai chief said that it will be of no use to lay optical fibre in the country for broadband services without having enough spectrum. "There is need for more spectrum. There is no point to lay fibre when no spectrum is available. I am talking of access spectrum," Khullar said.

He said that there is a need to delicence (free spectrum) telecom spectrum to spread use of broadband. "Why are we not delicensing more spectrum and in several bands. This is something on which we have already made recommendation on as far back as 2012 but unfortunately it did not make any progress," Khullar said.

In 2012, Trai had recommended to delicence (make free) 20MHz of spectrum between 1880-1900MHz frequencies for private and indoor use of telecom services. Trai Chairman said that there is also no progress on auction of 700MHz band - the most efficient spectrum for telecom services at present - for which the regulator has already given its recommendations.

Touching upon availability of spectrum with defence, Khullar urged that government department should end stand-off and release spectrum that can be used for telecom services. "There must be some end to this stand-off between one department of government and the other that for security consideration we will not release whatever is lying. I am sorry the world over all Ministry of Defence behave exactly the same way," Khullar said.