The government on Wednesday said it has cleared Norwegian telecom firm Telenor's proposal to invest Rs 1,000 crore in a joint venture company in the telecom sector.
As many as 58 companies raised money from automatic route and 8 firms raised via approval route.
The Norway-based firm, Telenor, entered India through a joint venture with Unitech Wireless.
The government has allocated spectrum to Vodafone in all 14 service areas, where the telecom major won in November 2012 auction for Rs 1,127.94 crore (Rs 11,27 billion).
Govt likely to make security clearance mandatory for telcos irrespective of equity holding before giving licences; DoT members to meet today.
The government has suffered a loss of Rs 12,488.93 crore (Rs 124.88 billion) due to under-invoicing of gross revenue by six telecom companies including Reliance Communications, Vodafone and Bharti Airtel, the CAG said in a damning report on Friday.
After building a subscriber base of nearly 50 million in about eight chequered years, it finally gave up as it saw itself up against a 600-pound gorilla that breezed through double that many subscribers in a fraction of that time, says N Sundaresha Subramanian.
Since August 2013, FIPB has approved two FDI proposals in the telecom sector.
Eight FDI proposals worth Rs 1,311.54 crore (Rs 13.11 billion), including that of Norwegian telecom firm Telenor, have been cleared by the government on the basis of FIPB approvals.
The auction started off with the 36th round this morning. At the end of 35 rounds on Friday, bids worth around Rs 54,600 crore had been received by the government.
Government's resolution on the contentious issue of spectrum usage fee seems to have found favour with telecom operators with none of them withdrawing their application from airways auction on the last day on Monday.
After a two year run-in with controversies, telecom sector now looks stable and seems back on its feet with initial investment proposal of over Rs 11,000 crore (Rs 110 billion) received in 2013.
The telecom spectrum auction entered the 33rd round of bidding today after starting off from the Rs 52,689 crore (Rs 526. 89 billion) mark this morning.
The amount generated so far is about 86 per cent of what the 3G auction fetched in 2010.
Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Jio Infocomm and five other telecom firms will battle it out at the spectrum auction tomorrow, from which the government expects to garner at least Rs 11,300 crore (Rs 113 billion).
Telecom companies that bought spectrum in the 2G auction of November last year would lose around Rs 4,000 crore
