For anyone interested in this topic (and Indian government in general) I highly recommend Dr. Arun Shourie's book "Governance and the sclerosis that has set in"

For anyone interested in this topic (and Indian government in general) I highly recommend Dr. Arun Shourie's book "Governance and the sclerosis that has set in". It gives a detailed look at the telecom mess and the kind of mentality that causes it. Dr. Shourie was a cabinet minister in early 2001 and was single handedly responsible for Telecom reforms that made even these auctions possible. He wrote the entire book on this experience. Few points: 1. India had several telecom "circles" based on the political borders of the states and handful of players (I think 6 or so). All 6 of them had lawsuites against each other and with government so around 50+ lawsuites over petty things. Dr. Shourie worked hard to clear every single of those lawsuites without having to wait for the courts to resolve it. 2. Indian regulations requires the cell towers to not extend their range beyond the political boundary. People who wrote the rules refused to acknowledge the fact that you can't stop radio waves based on political borders. 3. You had to apply different licenses based on how you will use the spectrum. For example for voice you had to apply one license and for SMS another license, for data another license. Also, a separate license for inter-circle communication. Which means if you want to allow your Mumbai customers to be able to send SMS to Delhi customers you required a separate license for the two circles and separate license for Mumbai to Bangalore communication. Also, separate licenses for ISD, international communication. 4. Indian government also insisted that they get to control how telecom company will roll out their towers. So if you erect a tower in Mumbai you must also erect a tower in some village even if you don't have any customers there. If you fail to do so, you will be fined. 5. Indian government also wanted (and actually did) to ban services like Skype because they would enable voice over data thus making a separate voice license pointless. For many years VoIP was illegal in India. The body responsible for these hair-brained regulations was a technical body called DoT. Not only Dr. Shourie worked hard to resolve most of these regulations and replace them with something sensible, he insisted that if telecom companies are not interested in even bidding for some circles we should give them the spectrum for free. No telecom company was even interested in applying for spectrum in many parts of India (something unthinkable today) which were then given on first come first serve basis. Later when telecom revolution happened and spectrum value exploded through the roof, some people wanted to investigate Shourie for corruption for giving this obviously valuable spectrum for free. Even the supreme court of India had trouble understanding why the spectrum that sells for billions today was not worth anything 20 years ago. Having known Dr. Shourie personally, he is one of the smartest and competent individual Indian government was thankful to have working for them.