The Supreme Court will hear on Monday a plea of the telecom operators to set a fresh schedule to pay the adjusted gross revenue worth Rs 1.47 lakh crore to the department of telecom.
The court has listed the hearing of the modification pleas filed by the operators for February 3.
A bench headed by Chief Justice S. A. Bobde had last week taken note of the submissions by a battery of senior lawyers, including A. M. Singhvi and C. A. Sundaram, and said it would list the fresh pleas before the same bench which had heard the earlier petition. This gave the telecom operators some breather from the January 23 deadline.
The officials of the Licensing Finance Policy Wing of the telecom department later directed all the departments concerned to not take any coercive action against the operators if they fail to clear their AGR dues till further orders by the Supreme Court.
Apart from the telecom operators, several non-telecom PSUs such as Oil India, GAIL India and PowerGrid have AGR dues worth Rs 3 lakh crore.
They have also moved the apex court filing a clarificatory/modificatory petition.
Vodafone Idea and Airtel are worst hit by the top court’s order, facing statutory dues of Rs 53,039 crore and Rs 35,586 crore, respectively. Tata Teleservices faces dues of Rs 13,823 crore. Including the three, around 15 telcos need to pay over Rs1.47 lakh crore to the government.
