"The Committee has either completely ignored our submissions or has cherry-picked our inputs and applied its own assumptions to arrive at incorrect conclusions without affording us any opportunity to refute the same," T V Ramachandran, the nominee of GSM players, said in a letter on Friday to R Bandhopadhyay, chairman of the committee.
COAI's decision comes after Department of Telecom on Thursday allowed rival CDMA player Reliance Communications to expand its GSM-based mobile services across the country.
Ramachandran, who is also the director-general of COAI, alleged the committee was working with a "predetermined mindset" and that their pleas were "falling on deaf ears".
He said till date there have been no deliberations among the committee members on the existing criteria of March 2006, inputs received from different stakeholders, and the concerns being voiced by the GSM industry.
"Ever since the constitution of the Committee, I have been repeatedly expressing my concerns as regards the rigid and hasty approach with which the Committee is approaching its mandate.
"Upon my expressing concern and disagreement with the approach of the committee, I have been told that I can put my views into a dissenting note," Ramachandran said. The government had last month constituted the panel to look into the subscriber linked criteria for spectrum allocation as recommended by the Telecom Engineering Centre.
The GSM operators had protested against the TEC report, saying the subscriber figures for allocation of additional spectrum have been arrived at in an arbitrary manner, and wanted a review of the report.
According to COAI, the terms of reference of the committee explicitly stated that the review should be done in a scientific and practicable manner.
While the panel has reputed academic and scientific authorities, "none of the Committee members have the required practical technical experience in running a cellular mobile network and it would be incorrect if this committee too, were to review the criteria using only a theoretical approach," Ramachandaran said.
Besides DoT additional secretary Bandhopadhyay, the committee includes wireless advisor to department of telecom, P K Garg; Prof Bhaskar Ramamurti, IIT-Chennai; and Dr Ajit Kumar Chaturvedi from IIT-Kanpur, among others.
