New Delhi:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected telecom companies’ plea to re-compute adjusted gross revenues, or AGRs, amid a long-standing dispute over payment of dues to the government. The companies raised concerns about the financial crisis affecting all firms.

Vodafone India, Bharti Airtel, and other companies had filed a curative petition against the court’s October 2019 verdict, in which they were directed to pay the government Rs 92,000 crore within three months. The current petitions are against a September 2020 order requiring payment of AGR dues over a 10-year period; 10 per cent of the total by March 31 every year.

In their petition today the telecom firms claimed a grave error by the Department of Telecommunications, or DoT, in calculating those dues – licence fees and spectrum charges.

Reports indicate the DoT-calculated AGR dues total over Rs 1 lakh crore; Airtel is believed to owe Rs 43,980 crore and Vodafone Rs 58,254 crore. But per the companies’ own calculations, Airtel said it owed only Rs 13,004 crore and Vodafone claimed dues of only Rs 21,533 crore.

Similar recalculations were made against dues owed by other companies, including Tata Teleservices. The telecom firms also complained about the court’s “arbitrary penalty”.

Computation of AGR is the basis for revenue-sharing between telecom firms and the government, which receives money for allotting licences and spectrum usage.

The DoT calculates the government’s share as a percentage of the AGR. This amounts to three to five per cent in spectrum usage fees and eight per cent as licensing fees.

But how exactly the AGR is calculated has been a contentious point for nearly two decades now, with the telecom firms insisting it must only include core revenue. The government, however, includes all revenue, including those from non-telecom channels, in its calculation.

In 2019 the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the government, and ordered the telecom firms to pay up Rs 92,000 crore within 180 days. That order hit the telecom industry hard; Vodafone India and Bharti Airtel posted record losses in the following days.

In July 2022 Airtel said it had opted to defer payment of approximately Rs 3,000 crore in AGR up to FY 2018/19 – not tabulated in the court’s 2019 order – by four years. A week earlier Vodafone said it too had decided to defer payment of additional AGR dues of Rs. 8,837 crore by four years.

This was after the DoT raised an AGR demand for two financial years beyond 2016/17, which were not covered by the Supreme Court’s order.

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