New Delhi: An inter-ministerial panel has approved the draft RFP (tender document) to select the auctioneer who will conduct the upcoming spectrum sale, including for 5G radio waves, according to a source.
The Department of Telecom hopes to have the auctioneer in place by early-September, the source added. The matter is likely to be taken up in the next meeting of Digital Communications Commission (DCC) scheduled this month.
Once the DCC takes a view on the issue, the Request for Proposal (RFP) will be floated. The inter-ministerial committee, apart from officials from the Telecom Department, has representation from the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Electronics and IT, and Niti Aayog, among others.
The panel has cleared the draft RFP for selection of the auctioneer to conduct the spectrum auction, the source noted. The last spectrum auction in October 2016 saw only 40 per cent of the spectrum offered being sold.
In that auction, the government had garnered Rs 65,789 crore from sale of just 965 MHz, out of the entire 2,354.44 MHz that was on offer at the base price of Rs 5.63 lakh crore. Among the bandwidth which went unsold was the valuable 700 Mhz which the telecom companies gave a miss, citing high base price.
The government, which did not auction any spectrum in 2017-18 and 2018-19, wants to hold the nation’s biggest auction of over 8,000 MHz of airwaves this year.
However, the price of the radiowaves continues to be a hurdle.