Even as other private telecom operators in the field of basic, cellular and paging services are lobbying with the Government for reliefs in the ``high licence fees'' they had bid three years ago, Iridium has launched for reliefs two weeks after they signed the provisional licence.

Iridium India Telecom Ltd (IITL) got the licence for providing Global Mobile Personal Communications Services (GMPCS) on October 28. The licence allows the company to provide satellite based communications services using a portable mobile phone and having the same number wherever a subscriber travels in the world.

The obligation that the company has by wayof licence fees is a paltry Rs one crore per year as the fixed component and a 16 per cent share out of their annual revenue for the Government as the variable component. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had issued provisional licence to the company on October 28, after the PM announced four days before that the company had been given the green signal.

The DoT, sources say, was under pressure to issue the licence in a hurry after the PM's announcement. In fact, legal advise within the DoT was not sought before issuing the provisional licence as the stand on this has been clear that there is no legal standing of a ``provisional'' licence. Sources say that a licence can be of a day's duration or a year's, but no court of law recognises a "provisional'' licence.

The cries for concessions come from a company which used a lot of its might to get a licence before the deadline of November 1, to coincide with the worldwide launch of the service. Multi-billion dollar American equipment giant MotorolaInternational Inc has a 20 per cent equity holding in the Indian outfit, while globally Iridium is owned by an international consortium of companies with a large chunk owned by Motorola.

The only safeguard that the DoT built in the licence to IITL, in order to buy more time for fine tuning the licence agreement, was that the licence was provisional and that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) would be ``consulted'' before finalising the terms and conditions of the final agreement and awarding of the ``real'' licence.

The company has now approached both the TRAI and the DoT to ease the licence fee burden. The company has said that Iridium has launched more than 66 satellites worldwide and has been promoted by Motorola Inc. As a result the company is supposed to pay a major share of their revenue as royalty to Motorola. If another 16 per cent is paid to the Indian government, there will be very little left for the other shareholders which include several Indian financial institutions IDBI(25 per cent), IL&FS (17.5 per cent), ICICI 912.5 per cent) and others as smaller shareholders.

The TRAI has now stepped in to ask the DoT to justify the basis on which the licence fees - both the fixed and the variable component were derived.