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Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India (AUSPI) responded by
saying: “No additional commercial condition for a lock-in period on sale
of equity of promoters should be added to the existing licences including Unified
Access Service Licences. We are against such a condition being added in any licence.
If such a condition is to be added then it should only be in the licences to be
issued in future; however in this case also we consider it to be a ‘step
backward’.” Tata
Teleservices thinks that earlier when the telecom sector was at its nascent stage
there were very limited numbers of mobile operators across the world with an experience
to provide cellular services of more than 1 lakh lines. However with the passage
of time the telecom sector has grown rapidly, “therefore the lock in period
may have served a purpose when the Department of Telecom (DoT) was licensing the
cellular services initially creating competitive market for cellular services
and encouraging the creation of infrastructure. At this time the lock in period
is no longer necessary.” “There
has been no specific clause on Lock-in period initially neither in the first and
second cellular licenses or the licences issued afterwards except that a clause
of five years lock-in period was introduced in 1999 for the first and second CMTS
licences when they were being migrated from fixed licence fee to revenue share
model. Even in the absence of such a clause, the telecom field has progressed
tremendously well. Therefore it appears that there is no requirement to bring
in a lock-in period now when there are 10 to 12 operators in a service area as
compared to 2-4 earlier,” opined Reliance Communication. “The
Government should be concerned with the proliferation of telecom services as per
the licence conditions and not with the sale of equity etc,” it added. While
Cellular Operators of India (COAI) is of the opinion that against the back drop
of the current economic downturn it is a challenge for companies to raise investible
funds. Nevertheless telecom is still one sector where there is still a high degree
of interest being shown by foreign investors and inflow of valuable foreign investment
into the country “therefore we think lock in period is not required.”
In addition,
the consultation paper dealt with issues like who can have 10 per cent or more
stakes in the licensee company and whose networth has to be taken into consideration
for determining the eligibility for grant of license, what should be the minimum
lock-in period for sale of equity of such promoters, what should be the date from
which the lock-in period should be reckoned. Last
year, the DoT had recommended that the existing telecom licensing norms should
be amended and a three to five year lock-in be imposed on the sale of promoters
equity in start-up companies who were given licenses in early 2008. | 
