27 September 2024
India’s Supreme Court has rejected the latest appeals from Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea that seek to have debts they owe the government recalculated..png?lu=214)
The AGR fees, which amount to a combined total of roughly $11 billion, were calculated by the government in a court ruling back in 2019.
Since then, the operators have been arguing to have the fees recalculated, reduced, or otherwise delayed, citing the highly competitive market and their impoverished financial positions. The Supreme Court has agreed to extend the payment period to 10 years but not budging on the total owed.
This latest appeal comes in the form of a ‘curative petition’, with the telcos arguing that the AGR fees had been miscalculated. In their plea, the telcos said the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had made a “grave error” in its calculations and described the resulting figures as “arbitrary.”
The Supreme Court, however, has once again rejected these pleas, saying that no case had been made “within the parameters indicated in the decision.”
