Under fire for fathering a Rs 60,000-crore scam, communications & IT minister A Raja hit back on Friday with all the ammunitions in his store. At a hastily convened press conference, Raja said that spectrum and licences were allocated to new players according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) recommendations and that he was willing to resign if proved otherwise. He said all his decisions conformed to the national telecom policy, 1999, Cabinet and Parliament approval.

In his offensive best, Raja blamed the “undeclared cartel”—an apparent reference to the existing telecom operators who were there before he took the ministry reins last year—for the controversy. The minister said he was being opposed because he sought to “transcend the telecom revolution to a new era” by promoting more competition so that tariffs come down further and tele-density spreads.

The controversy surrounding Raja is that he accorded licences and spectrum at cheap rates to a host of new applicants, of which two new licence-holders, Unitech and Swan, made a fortune by selling a part of their stakes. The two companies, which received spectrum for a measly amount of up to Rs 1,651 crore, recently sold some of their stakes at a valuation of around $2 billion without having any skeletal structure in place, subscribers or knowledge of the telecom business. In fact, Sanjay Chandra, head of Unitech Wireless, had even said that the company had no plans of investing any money in towers, which constitute the nuts and bolts of the telecom business. Raja’s critics maintain that the pan-India licence charge of Rs 1,651 crore was a price discovered way back in 2001, and that 2G spectrum should ideally have been auctioned to realize the current market-determined price.

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