On Sunday, the Finance Ministry had placed an objection on waiving off part of the interest and penalty of the telecom sectors which were burdened by the Supreme Courts AGR(adjusted gross revenue). The finance ministry officials stated that any concession on the payment of penalty would send in a wrong message and would lead to an increase in such demands on a regular basis.
The government officials have been working non-stop towards clearing out this chaos of the penalties in the telecom sectors. These sectors have been granted the timeline till March 17 of 2020 to clear their debts. They have been asked to pay the amount of Rs. 1.4 lakh crore to the DoT as this is in line with the earlier license fee and spectrum usage charges.
The charges and the penalties in total amount to hefty sums of money. The license fees amount to Rs. 92,641 crore whereas Rs. 22,589 crore are the base price. They also stated that all efforts need to be taken to protect all the companies at all costs as Vodafone-Idea is on the brink of collapse. Vodafone-Idea needs to pay an amount of Rs. 53,000 crore and has paid off the amount of Rs. 2,500 crore only. Whereas, Airtel has to pay the amount of Rs. 35,000 crore and Tata group would have to pay Rs. 14,000 crore.
The government was worried that the collapse of any of these companies would create panic in the country which would lead to the disruption of the Digital India Programme. Reliance Jio, the biggest telecom conglomerate in the country was safe from this mess as it had due to Rs. 200 crores which was cleared up.
