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“This figure is likely to go up in the next few months as telecom operators will deposit their third and fourth quarter statutory dues,” a senior government official told ET.
More than half of the payments have come from Reliance Jio<\/a> Infocomm, which deposited over Rs 41,000 crore with the government as payment for the spectrum it has bought in previous auctions. In October, Jio had paid Rs 10,792 crore followed by another Rs 30,791 crore on Wednesday, to clear all its spectrum dues except for the March 2021 sale.. Bharti Airtel<\/a> had last December paid about Rs 15,519 crore to the government as spectrum dues for the 2014 sale.
The receipts come as a respite to the government as the 5G spectrum auctions, which were supposed to account for a large chunk of the budgetary provision, have been deferred to the next financial year.
Also, analysts had estimated that the government would fall short of its Budget estimates, with Vodafone Idea<\/a> and Bharti Airtel<\/a> having opted to defer their spectrum payments by four years, under a government relief package.
Technically, the DoT receives licence fee and spectrum usage charge from telecom operators on a quarterly basis, and this along with the instalment for the spectrum paid by telecom operators who bought the bandwidth through auctions forms the majority bulk of non-tax revenue to the government. While the SUC has been discontinued as a charge for spectrum, which will be auctioned in the future, telcos have to keep paying the quarterly fees for the bandwidth they had previously purchased.