As the head of state, and a concerned citizen of the country, President K.R. Narayanan has his reasons for asking Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to reconsider the government's recent decision to bail out various telecom operators. After all, the issue has generated so much controversy, for well over a year, and it is true that before he was removed Communications Minister Jagmohan had appeared to be opposing at least some of these concessions. That is, in fact, why the President asked Jagmohan to see him last week, to throw some light on the processes that went into the final decision-making. So when confronted with a situation where a controversial decision was taken by a caretaker government, the President appears within his rights to recommend caution.What the President has not seen, however, is that the other side has equally valid and compelling arguments. For one, the issue at hand is so contentious that any decision, no matter what, would have raised a hue and cry and the country would have hadto pay a huge price for it. The debate, of course, centres around the fact that, after having committed to pay abnormally high fixed annual licence fees, the country's private telecom operators found they couldn't make these payments. The issue then was whether they should be penalised for this, or not. If they were to be penalised, and asked to give up their networks, it is well accepted that any new entrant would come in only on less-onerous terms - that is, on what is called a revenue-sharing basis, instead of a fixed annual fee. Once the government accepted this postulation in the new telecom policy, the question was whether this new alternative could be given to the old operators - could they be allowed to keep their networks, but now pay the new and lower licence fee? In other words, and this needs to be emphasised, the government will get the same amount of revenue in the future whether it gives the telecom licences to new operators or if it continues with the old ones - the old operators have to,it goes without saying, clear all outstanding dues.There is one school of thought, represented by people such as Jagmohan, who believe that even if the government does not lose revenue by letting the old operators continue on new terms, the issue is one of the sanctity of contracts. If you give huge concessions to one lot of people in trouble, you have to do the same for other groups as well. The problem with this view, however morally correct it sounds, is that it would not be easy to implement. For one, the moment licences are cancelled, the operators would go to various courts across the country. And the country's nascent telecom revolution, already delayed by several years, would have been set back another few years with no new operators allowed to come in. Even the process of getting operators to hand over their circles and granting new licences would add to the delay. So while the whole world would be making the most of the Internet revolution, we would still be sorting out problems relating to theInternet's backbone - telecoms. Seems a bit like cutting one's nose to spite one's face.
