Telecom Panel To Vet Telelink Bid For Licence In Rajasthan
A meeting of all the seven members of the Telecom Commission has been scheduled for February 10 to take a decision on the award of the Rajasthan basic telecom services licence to Telelink Networks, which has been hanging fire for more than a year now.
Telelink had outbid Reliance Telecom in the first round of bidding for provision of basic telecom services by offering Rs 1,110 crore for the Rajasthan circle while Reliance Telecom had quoted just Rs 14 crore. However, the award of the licence to Telelink has been delayed owing to the presence of the telecom scam-tainted ARM Ltd in the consortium.
Further, Telelinks bid did not comply with the tender guideline that a bidding company should quote an annual payment schedule which is such that at the end of any year, the sum of annual payments is not less than the corresponding sum of the datum schedule.
The datum schedule was the 35Y schedule of payments, according to which the gross financial bid is divided by 35 to yield an amount, say, Y. The company would then have to pay Rs Y in the first five years, Rs 2Y in the next five years and Rs 4Y in the last five years.
Therefore, in Telelinks case, it should have paid about Rs 32 crore (Rs 1,110 crore divided by 35) for each of the first five years. However, in the licence fee stream that it quoted, the company said it would pay only Rs 10 crore in the first year and Rs 150 crore in the second year.
DoT subsequently asked Telelink whether it was willing to increase its first years payment to Rs 32 crore, to which the company agreed. The legal advisor to DoT, O P Nahar termed this negotiation as being violative of the tender norms and recommended against the award of the licence to the company.
The law ministry had cleared the Telelink bid in January and had sent the Telelink file back to DoT. The commission is expected to study the file and recommend a decision to the communications minister, Beni Prasad Verma. However, sources said a final decision on the companys bid will be taken only by the Union cabinet.