If the prime minister doesn't plan to step down post the FDI fiasco, he should get down to real governance -- and can start by having the numerous clowns in his court shut up, says Saisuresh Sivaswamy.
Here's what your favourite celebrities are tweeting.
Chiefs of leading telecom firms, including Sunil Mittal of Bharti Airtel, Anil Ambani of RCom and Vittorio Colao of Vodafone, met Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Wednesday and placed their views.
Kapil Sibal, telecom minister, said many companies borrowed heavily to pay for 3G licences late last year. These companies were now facing difficulty in raising resources for the business, upsetting the calculations they had made while bidding aggressively for the licences, he said.
The policy was earlier expected to be unveiled by December this year, but delays in receiving recommendations have pushed the date to next year.
Congress spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan was named a member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee into the 2G spectrum scam after her colleague Abhishek Singhvi recused himself taking the plea that he had appeared for cellular operators in the court as a senior advocate.
According to reports, CAG has sought details from the department of telecommunication on the total available spectrum in the country and how much has been allocated to private telecom operators from 2000 onward and at what value.
With the government moving a resolution in the Lok Sabha to set up a Joint Parliamentary Committee on the 2G spectrum issue, the battle lines between the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and the Bharatiya Janata Party have become more tightly drawn with the Congress preparing its ammunition to target the BJP during its National Democratic Alliance government, in a bid to expose the actions of their telecom ministers.
The one-man panel that went into the procedures for giving 2G licences between 2001 and 2009 on Monday submitted its report and is understood to have held some officials responsible for improper spectrum allotment.
The minister cited the example of Income Tax refunds, where sometimes officials demand money for giving a refund.
Canadian firm Research in Motion is installing and testing a new service, to be made available before January 31, which will automatically render lawfully intercepted BlackBerry messenger messages in a format readable by Indian agencies.
The Supreme Court on Friday severely criticised Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal for making statements undermining the Comptroller and Auditor General of India's report on the 2G spectrum scam and asked him to behave with some sense of responsibility.
Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader and Parliament's Public Accounts Committee Chairman Murli Manohar Joshi hit out at Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal for questioning the Comptroller and Auditor General report on the 2G Spectrum scam. He said that Sibal's comments showed both the PAC and the CAG in poor light and said that the telecom minister's conduct was unbecoming.
Whether Sibal has effectively defended Raja or not as a counsel is unclear, but his target seems to be the prime minister, feels M R Venkatesh.
In an interview with CNN-IBN, Bharatiya Janata Party president Nitin Gadkari has slammed Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal for questioning the 2G report and rubbished the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh's alleged links with terror. Here are some excerpts from the interview:
Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai has asked Public Accounts Committee Chairman Murli Manohar Joshi for permission to react to Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal\\'s open attack on him over the 2G report, according to sources.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Tuesday warned that the growth of the telecom industry would be hurt if companies did not align their profit-making motives with the national interest and such a scenario could lead to over-regulation of the sector.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Wednesday said the growth in the sector is essentially centered on adequate spectrum availability, assuring government will make all efforts to provide requisite airwaves to meet industry's demand.
Jailed former Telecom Minister A Raja on Wednesday told a Delhi court that he would get Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the then finance minister P Chidambaram and the current Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal summoned as witnesses to prove that the government did not incur any loss in the 2G allocation.
Seeking to corner the government, the Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday said it was "seriously" examining the possibility of bringing a privilege motion against Union Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal for announcing a probe into the 2G Spectrum allocation from 2001 at a time when Parliament was in session.
The government will send notices to 85 companies asking why their licences should not be cancelled for suppressing facts, said Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Monday.
The Bharatiya Janata Party is gearing up to launch a fresh attack on the ruling United Progressive Alliance at a major news conference on Thursday afternoon. Meanwhile, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal defended Prime Minister Manmohan Singh over the 2G row, saying irrespective of what the concerned minister says, the PM is not liable for his actions. The Congress Core Committee is scheduled to discuss the spectrum row later in the evening.
Speaking at a national workshop organised by National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology, Sibal said that major thrust to achieve such a growth rate has to come from the secondary and tertiary sectors.
Sibal said the government will have enough radio waves for all operators after it is released from the defence services as well as the cancellation of 122 2G new licences by the Supreme Court in the 2G spectrum allocation case.
Refusing to be labeled as an enemy of the social media, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal has called for the Internet to be governed by regulations similar to the print and the electronic media.
Amidst the controversy over the allocation of spectrum and grant of telecom licences, the government on Monday said all licences are proposed to be renewed after 10 years instead of the 20-year period earlier.
"The telecom companies under the (proposed)NTP-2011 will have to file an application 30 months prior for the renewal of the telecom licenses and it (the licence) will be renewed for 10 years unlike 20 years as of now," Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal said.
The ISPs had already made a presentation to telecom minister Kapil Sibal to request his help in such a process if the government did not want to continue with the current ISP regime.
Trashing the report on 2G scam by Justice Shivraj Patil, former telecom minister Arun Shourie on Tuesday accused Union Minister Kapil Sibal of trying to save former telecom minister A Raja by functioning as his advocate.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal has accused the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government over the 2G spectrum allocation
"Mobiles have the potential to be more effective than TV, PC, outdoor or digital displays, as it has the ability to influence the consumer at the last mile of transaction. It is observed that a person on a single day remains exposed to one screen more as compared to any other, and that is their mobile phones," says Vishwanath Alluri, Founder, Chairman and CEO, IMImobile.
Maintaining the zero-loss claim, therefore, involves justifying the failure to do proper price discovery, as through the spectrum auction in 2010 for 3G services.
Amidst the controversy over its figures of revenue loss on account of allocation of 2G spectrum, government auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General, on Monday said it stood by the report submitted to Parliament late last year.
'If Parliament had not been obstructed, even the Indian media would not have realised that such a monumental scam had taken place,' says Arun Jaitley.
After engaging in a war of words with industrialist Ratan Tata, Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrasekhar has now given a 7-point agenda to Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal suggesting that the ministry be made "free of lobbyists and wheeler-dealers" to clean up the sector.
Refusing to be defensive on the 2G spectrum scam, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Wednesday hit back at BJP for raking up the issue, alleging that "irregularities" had taken place during the Vajpayee government and these would be exposed within weeks.
The all India launch date is still not fixed due to differences between the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the GSM mobile industry.
It was after a long gap that an aggressive and united Congress took the Bharatiya Janata Party head on in both the Houses of Parliament over the WikiLeaks exposure on the cash-for-vote scam as the party fielded its brightest and the best.
Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group stocks plummeted on Wednesday after ADAG chairman Anil Ambani reportedly met Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal.
Hyperactive Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal -- busy trying to 'rescue' the UPA government in the 2G scam ever since he took over after Andimuthu Raja resigned in November -- finds himself caught up in another spectrum scam of the Indian Space Research Organisation's gift of 70Mhz at throwaway prices to its former officer in 2005 that is now turning out to be a Rs 2-lakh crore (Rs 2 trillion) scandal.
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