DoT collects Rs 69,179 crore from telecom companies

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has collected Rs 69,179 crore as non-tax revenue dues from telcos so far, smoothly surpassing the Rs 54,886 crore estimated from the communications sector for FY22 in the Budget. This figure is likely to go up in the next few months as telecom operators will deposit their third and fourth quarter statutory dues.

More than half of the payments have come from Reliance Jio InfoCOMM, which deposited over Rs 41,000 crore with the government as payment for the spectrum it has bought in previous auctions. Bharti Airtel had paid about Rs 15,519 crore last month to the government as spectrum dues for the 2014 sale.

The DoT receives license fee and spectrum usage charge from telecom operators on a quarterly basis, and this along with the installment for the spectrum paid by telecom operators who bought the bandwidth through auctions forms the majority bulk of non-tax revenue to the government.

But with Jio and Airtel prepaying some of their spectrum dues, the government managed to collect more than budgeted.

Also, analysts had estimated that the government would fall short of its Budget estimates, with Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel having opted to defer their spectrum payments by four years, under a government relief package.