The changes approved by the cabinet yesterday have not be enough for the bill to pass this year - the bill was not even presented in Parliament. They are also upset by the delays in the creation of the TRAI, without which they feel reluctant to sign the agreement, leave alone pay the first installment of their hefty licence fees. The DoT has also not gone ahead with issuing LoIs for three other circles, where the bidders are keen to sign up. But the DoT has acted on none of these three, using as its perennial excuse possibly non-existent delays at the Law Ministry, the government's internal solicitors. It is difficult to fathom why the government is delaying the legislative and executive actions needed for a completion of these reforms.
Every delay opens possibilities of further setbacks .
The reluctance of the government to accept changes to the TRAI bill suggested by the parliamentary committee on telecom has been followed by a committee report criticising the entire telecom privatisation process. The only explanation at hand for government indecision seems to be the Minister's preoccupation with events in his home state of Uttar Pradesh, where inconclusive recent elections led to a hung assembly, its suspension and the imposition of President's rule. Indeed, October's forecast of a TRAI sometime after April 1997, with significant operational wireline networks not before the third quarter of next year, now seems almost certain.