The department of telecom (DoT) said that it won’t take coercive action against telecom firms to immediately recover dues, providing some relief to operators such as Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel. The decision came just before the deadline for payment of adjusted gross revenue (AGR). A fresh petition by telecom operators is to be heard by the Supreme Court next week. Reliance Jio, however, decided to pay its dues of around £19.5 million. The company had a much lower outstanding amount.
The older companies, especially Vodafone Idea, are pinning their hopes on a relief on the payment schedule, and have said that lack of a sympathetic hearing could mean the end of their business. While Vodafone Idea needs to pay £5.30 billion to the DoT in past dues following the October 24 AGR judgment, the amount due on Airtel is £3.56 billion and that on Tata Tele is nearly £1.40 billion. Overall, the Supreme Court had ordered the telecom industry to pay £14.7 billion on the matter while an amount of similar nature was also slapped on many state-owned utilities. The last date of payment was fixed as January 23.
The DoT asked its administrative department to take “no coercive action” against the telecom companies in relation to the dues “until further orders”. It asked the ministry to file a “detailed status report of compliance, or otherwise.” Facing huge payment dues, both Vodafone Idea and Airtel had sought relief from the government. Both the companies, that had reported record losses in the third quarter of fiscal 2019-20 (Vodafone Idea suffering the worst quarterly loss for any company in corporate India), are running huge debt running to over £10 billion.
In their fresh plea this week, the companies said that they will pay up the AGR dues but need an easy payment schedule to help them survive. A host of senior advocates had requested a bench headed by Chief Justice S A Bobde for urgent hearing on their fresh pleas for working out a reasonable payment schedule to help the industry tide over difficult times.
