Delhi: Auction for over 90 FM radio stations soon

New Delhi, May 2: The Government is soon going to auction licence for operating over 90 FM radion stations for which bids were not received in the Phase II of the liberalisation of radio.

Moreover, it has received 35 more applications for running the community radio under the new liberalised policy.

At present as many as 57 private FM radiostations are operational.

The Information and Broadcasting ministry would review the operations of the 250 radio stations which are expected to go on air by the year end, and then decide the time for bidding for the vacancies, an official told sources.

Commercial viablity of the FM radio stations would be one of the main factors to be taken into consideration.

Most of these licnces would be given for class C and D cities.

The process for reaching FM radio far and wide in the country began last year when licences for 250 radio station across 91 cities were sold, which brought the government a revenue of 1,100 Crore.

Major players that went in for aggressive bidding in the Phase II included the Sun Group, Anil Ambani-controlled Adlabs, the Times Group and HT Music etc.

Realising the mistakes of the 'licensing model' of the First Phase of FM Policy, which was a disaster, the government had adopted the revenue-sharing model in the second phase, which attracted a large number of bidders.

A mere 22 private FM channels were operationalised in Phase I, and one of these had closed down, citing high license fee as the reason for unsustainability of its operation.

The government had earned a sum of only Rs 37 crore from auction of 29 channels in 2000 as advance fee for setting up FM stations. All India Radio (AIR) was then projected to earn Rs 530 crore in the first year from the auction of about 100 FM stations in 40 cities in the first phase with a 15 per cent increase every year, after setting out with a reserve price of only Rs 75.4 crore.

However, several companies later went to court alleging the licence fee was too high and the guidelines too rigid.

The community radio which had so far been been set up by mostly educational institutions will soon see new players as the Government has now decided to broad base the policy by bringing 'Non-profit' organisations like civil society and voluntary organisations etc under its ambit in order to allow greater participation by the civil society on issues relating to development and social change The Ministry official said that 35 more applications, mostly from NGOs had been received for setting up community radio.

So far close to 60 letters of intent have been issued for setting up community radio.

UNI