Shri Kapil Sibal, Minister Communications, have approved the proposal of the DOT to impose a penalty of about Rs. 823 crore on the private telcos for understating their revenue and cheating the government on both payment of taxes as also revenue share to DOT.

It is well-known  that the private companies are adopting all dubious means to evade tax and other payments to government to increase their profits. This has been going on since they entered the telecom sector. They got all benefits from the government and also cheated the government. Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance, Tata Teleservices – all are involved in this scam. All of them together have understated together, as reported in the press, an amount not less than Rs. 10,268 crore during 200-07 and 2007-08.

Let us remember that when the private companies were granted licence for mobile services, one justification the government has said was that these licences would get about Rs. 1.25 lakh crore revenue for the government. On demand the licence fee was changed in to revenue sharing by which the government was to get about Rs. 55,000 crore at the minimum. But what actually the government got was a few thousands of crores of rupees.

In each and every agreement and transactions, the government has been submitting and succumbing to the unreasonable demands of the private telcos, while completely taking a negative attitude towards the justified demands of the BSNL and MTNL .

Will the government take a firm position to impose and collect the penalty as decided now or succumb to the pressure of the private companies as usual?