The government plans to put on auction the circles that went without bids in the just concluded sale of 2G mobile phone spectrum, by March 31, telecom minister Kapil Sibal said on Friday. The “intent” is to have the auction of spectrum in four circles, including Delhi and Mumbai, before the end of the fiscal, Sibal told a news conference. Blaming sensationalism for collapse of the country’s telecom growth story, Sibal said that India is no longer a ‘story we can share with the world’. Stating that the government was limited in its policy prescriptions, Sibal said that policymaking is best left to the government, however its wrong implementation can be open to judicial review. “Telecom is a proud growth story but something happened in 2007-08 which started a trend, emasculating the hand that laid the golden egg,” Sibal said. Sibal is of the opinion that the dynamics of market change from time to time. “Revenue cannot be the sole criterion of policy,” he said. Had the government stuck to TRAI recommendations on the 2G spectrum auction, the result would have been worse, he added. Finance minister P Chidambaram said the government “was not celebrating” the flopping of the auction and will continue to move forward. An Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) “will be meeting soon” to decide on the next course of action, he said. The auction, which lasted just two days, got total bids worth Rs 9,407.64 crore, just one-third of the minimum Rs 28,000 crore the government was expecting. The auction was a far cry from the 35-day bidding for the 3G spectrum in 2010 that got Rs 67,719 crore. Sibal said besides Rs 9,407.64 crore from the auction, the government will also get Rs 7,936 crore by way of one-time fee to be levied on existing telecom operators holding spectrum more than a prescribed limit. “There will be substantial net gain,” Chidambaram said.