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Bail-out and After Only Parliament can set right the defective telecom policy revision.
Besides the munificence coming embarrassingly close to the general elections, the decision raises the ethical question of whether the terms of a public contract should be changed post-tender to save the bidder from the consequence of his follies. As the poor telecom revenue growth in recent years has proved, the bids were unconscionably high. Without the bail-out, some of the 22 cellular-service and six basic-service licencees might have been forced to sell out, or even close down. But that hardly justifies a fee-amnesty and a drastic change in the contract terms. Why should the new entrant be pitted against his inefficient predecessor salvaged by well-wishers in power? While the decision is ill-conceived at best, and arguably suspicious, President K.R. Narayanan added an extraneous dimension to it by summoning for consultation former communications minister Jagmohan, known for his views against the bail-out and for starting a battle of letters with the prime minister. In the run-up to the elections, such interdiction from the head of state has become distressingly wide-ranging, on issues like bureaucratic appointments and aircraft purchases. The responsibility of removing the infirmities in the revised telecom policy, or in any public policy for that matter, should be left to Parliament, not to Rashtrapati Bhavan. Oh Kolkata
Renaming of countries, states, cities, or even roads is a harmless assertion of local power, however troublesome it may be to the likes of postmen and travel agents. Rhodesia did not become poorer after being rechristened Zimbabwe. Nor did the US consulate in Kolkata decide to shift its office after the street on which it is located got named after Ho Chi Minh, the man who forced the Americans to withdraw from Vietnam. The catch, however, lies in the fact that the Left Front, in renaming Calcutta, has acted not on any emotive impulse but at the prodding of a group called the Bhasha Shaheed Smriti Samiti which has a patently chauvinist agenda. It demands Bengali to be compulsory in the state's school curricula for all residents, signboards to be painted in Bengali, and to make its use in official documents obligatory, not optional. Such a charter of demands can readily inflame mob passions. Reeling under 22 years of leftist misrule, and the consequent de-industrialisation, the state needs a revival of its past reputation as a cosmopolitan city, not the notoriety of being the romping ground of language fanatics. If it becomes inhospitable to outsiders, its own people will suffer the most, no matter by which name you call them. |
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In March,
a month before the BJP-led coalition was voted out of power, it had revised the 1994
telecom policy by replacing -- for the new entrants -- the fixed licence fee with a share
of the revenue. The existing players, it was implied, would remain bound by the fixed
licence fee for which they had bid. However, by a sudden policy twist on July 6, the
government offered the existing players the option to migrate to the revenue-sharing
regime, and gave them a concession of Rs 1,443.60 crore by counting their licence period
from six months after it had started. 