The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed the telecom companies to pay Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR)-related dues which run into about Rs 1.6 lakh crore by telecom companies, within a period of 10 years. T

The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed the telecom companies to pay Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR)-related dues which run into about Rs 1.6 lakh crore by telecom companies, within a period of 10 years.
The Bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra ordered that 10% of the dues should be paid by March 31, 2021. The remaining dues has to be paid as yearly instalments from April 1, 2021 till March 31, 2031.
The chairpersons and Managing Direcors of the telecom service providers will have to sign undertakings to follow the court judgment, and any default in payment will attract contempt proceedings, the order said. The bank guarantees given for spectrum will be kept alive.
The top court had in October 2019 delivered the verdict on the AGR issue for calculating government dues of telecom companies, such as Vodafone Idea, Bharti Airtel and Tata Teleservices, as licence fee and spectrum usage charges.
Later, the Department of Telecom had in March this year moved a plea seeking permission for staggered payment in a time period of nearly 20 years for the telecom companies.
The bench, which also comprised justices B R Gavai and Krishna Murari, had reserved the verdict on July 20 on the aspect of granting timeline to telcos for staggered payment of AGR- related dues by saying that it will not hear even for a second the arguments on reassessment or re-calculation of the AGR.
Prior to this, it had asked the telecom companies to file their books of accounts for last ten year and give a reasonable time frame for paying the AGR dues and later got miffed when some senior lawyers started disputing the dues being calculated by the DoT.
It had said that the period of 15-20 years sought by some of the telecom companies was not reasonable and had asked the Centre as to how it would secure the payment of dues by them.
Later, the top court on August 24 was informed by the DoT that all liabilities including AGR-related dues should be cleared by telecom firms prior to spectrum trading as per the guidelines.