There were many flip-flops in telecom policy during BJP regime: Ratan Tata

He termed as "politically motivated" the efforts of GSM lobbyists, including Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar, saying their endeavour was to embarrass the Prime Minster Manmohan Singh and the ruling party.
Taking the powerful GSM operators head on for what he termed as holding of spectrum free of cost, Tata said, "Recent policy (allocation of licences in 2008) broke the powerful cartel which has been holding back competition and delaying the implementation of policies."
Coming out in support of the government telecom policy, which is being litigated in the Supreme Court, Tata said, "We should all note that many of the flip-flops in the telecom policies occurred during the BJP regime", an oblique reference that Chandrashekhar is close to the BJP.
Tata's strong comments came in an open letter to former telecom entrepreneur and Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar who had hit out Tata for allegedly not being transparent and being one of the biggest beneficiaries of the government telecom policy.
"Your affiliation to a particular political party is well-known and it appears that political aspirations and their endeavour to embarrass the Prime Minister and the ruling party may well have been the motivation behind your letter". Tata told Chandrasekhar.
Former Telecom Minister A Raja or for that matter any minister has not extended any advantage to group company Tata Teleservices, he said.
He further noted that the government auditor the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has not ascribed any value to 48 new GSM licences issued to incumbents during 2004-2008 and 65 mhz of additional spectrum.
Ratan Tata said he "fully supports the ongoing the investigation" - into the 2G spectrum allocation scam - and also "believes that the period of probe should be extended to 2001".
In an open letter to the Tata Group recently, Chandrashekhar said the company received out-of-turn spectrum causing losses of Rs 19,074.8 crore to the exchequer as estimated by the Comptroller and Auditor General, he said.
In the letter, Chandrasekhar had also said the government had received 575 applications for 2G spectrum by October 1, 2007. By specifying an arbitrary cut-off date of September 25, former telecom minister A Raja processed only 122 applications received till that date. Further, 110 were rejected and 343 applications were put in abeyance. The dual technology policy was announced 19 days later and the Tatas put in their applications around October 22.
According to Chandrasekhar, Tatas' application went three weeks after the 575 2G applications were received. "Today, Tatas already have GSM spectrum allocated and GSM service launched in most of the circles. But the 343 applications submitted three weeks before the Tata Group have neither been processed nor have any chance of ever being processed - so much for First-Come, First-Serve," he wrote in his letter.
Source: The Indian Express