Major telcos face Rs 1.4 lakh crore payout after SC order on AGR

After the Supreme Court’s judgement on the Central government's plea on its interpretation of Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR), telecom companies like Airtel, Vodafone Idea and others are affected the most. A bench of justices - Arun Mishra, S Abdul Nazeer, and MR Shah held that most revenue components, "except one or two", would fall within the Department of Telecommunications' (DoT) definition of AGR, thereby ending over 14 years of legal battle between the Centre and the telecom companies.

AGR is calculated on the basis of spectrum usage charges and licence fees payable by telecom companies. The telecom companies are liable to pay around 3-5 per cent of AGR as spectrum usage charges and 8 percent of the AGR and licence fees.

After the rejection of appeal against the definition of AGR, telecom companies would now have to pay a whopping Rs 1.4 lakh crore to the DoT. The SC says it would later fix a time schedule as to when the telecom companies have to pay the amount.

The fuss over defining AGR has been dragged so long that the actual dispute amount now remains a small proportion (25 per cent) of the total dues that the DoT is asking for. The total sum includes Rs 23,189 crore as the disputed amount, Rs 41,650 crore of the levy of interest, Rs 10,923 crore as penalty, and Rs 16,878 crore as interest on penalty. Just about three years ago, the total dues were just Rs 29,474 crore.