The law, he argued, does not allow retrospective application of a proposal. And when his detractors said he was doing a Turkman Gate-II, demolishing the budding private telecom initiative, we argued that if you gave concessions to the telecom industry just because it misjudged the size of the market, the same would have to be extended to other industries in trouble, such as steel, cement etc. So, when the Group on Telecom decided that the license structure would be eased for telecom circles still unawarded, we supported Jagmohan's view that any decision to apply this to existing players could only be taken by a full Cabinet as it was a complex one, amounting to changing tender conditions under which the sector hadbeen opened up.

After such a flawless start, unfortunately, Jagmohan got carried away, and hasn't made a right move since. First, perhaps at the behest of the Prime Minister, he asked the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to keep its new tariff order in abeyance, once it became clear that the BJP's ally Mamata Bannerjee was upset with the proposed hikes. Though he knew his action would, at one stroke, open the doors and allow politicians to continue to meddle with the recommendations of all regulatory authorities (power, insurance and what have you), and thereby constitute a step backwards in the reforms process, Jagmohan didn't seem to care.

What followed was a combination of viciousness and downright petty behaviour. The results of an eight-month old preliminary report of the CAG was made public, a report which showed up the TRAI as a body which was primarily interested in giving itself massive perquisites such as hefty per diems when travelling abroad. A couple of points need to be madehere. For one, the CAG report in question was a preliminary one, that did not take cognisance of the replies given by the TRAI under the procedure, the replies are actually evaluated by more senior CAG officials and, after this, a final report is submitted if the CAG himself believes the charges to be true. It's been eight months and the CAG hasn't finalised its report. Let's look at the preliminary report itself. It compares the TRAI chief and members' per diem of $500 to that paid to a secretary to the government, a person actually outranked by the chairperson of the TRAI. According to the CAG, the secretary gets anywhere between $60 and $100, in addition to the actual room rental for approved panel hotels. The CAG obviously believes all its readers are illiterate, and infers that the secretary gets a lot less than what the TRAI is giving to itself. Actu-ally, what secretaries to the government get, for travel to countries such as the US and Europe, is $125 per day, in addition to the room and ataxi/-chauffeur-driven car which are paid for on an actuals basis. Add all that up, and it totals to a lot more than $500. The CAG then says that in case the secretary is not staying in a hotel, he gets paid 25 percent of the daily allowance -- in actual practice they get 50 percent, but then someone obviously didn't tell the CAG!

Incidentally, all chief executives of public sector companies, usually equivalent to the rank of an additional secretary in the government and junior to TRAI members, also get a per diem allowance of $500.

It gets better. The CAG then gets virtuous and says the RBI does not allow more than $500 per day, and so the TRAI is even violating RBI rules when it applies this ceiling uniformly to all countries. Guess what? The CAG quotes an RBI circular of August 1994, but doesn't take into account the fact that in March 1995, the RBI increased this to $650 a day for its top executives. The reason why the RBI did this was that while the government could get the embassies abroad to fixrooms for secretaries and get them hefty discounts, no one was doing this for the RBI. The same note, incidentally, also allows officials to travel on airlines other than Air India, something that the CAG note comes down heavily on the TRAI for not doing.

All this, however, is missing the wood for the trees. The fact is that the debate over the TRAI is not whether the current chief Justice Sodhi has `given' himself a few more dollars than he should have. It's possible he has, and if he has, these can be recovered. What is suspect is the timing of Jagmohan's actions and his ensuring that the role of the TRAI is stripped down to the bare essentials. The TRAI, it has been ordained, will no longer be the adjudicator in matters of license conditions and fees, the basis of most disputes in any sector. It will only have this role for disputes between telecom service providers.

That's nothing but humbug. An essential part of the role of any regulator, not just the TRAI, is to ensure that the licensor (in thiscase the government) is not arm-twisting private operators and is giving them the services it promised, like, say, access to international gateways. This is all the more important when the government is not only the licensor but also owns telecom companies who could get hit by the competition. In fact, most of the disputes that have arisen so far in India's fledgling telecom sector have related to precisely this issue. It is truly sad that someone of Jagmohan's stature has allowed the battle to descend to this petty level.