.png)
A woman speaks on a mobile phone as she walks on a crowded street in Mumbai on February 2, 2012. (Punit Paranjpe/AFP/Getty Images)
The Indian Supreme Court on Thursday canceled 122 licenses handed out to telecommunications companies in 2008 by Andimuthu Raja, the former telecoms minister currently imprisoned.
The decision will likely trigger a wave of changes in the country’s telecom sector and will likely leave millions of Indians without cellular phone service across the country. The ruling affects eight operators, who had all 122 of the licenses.
Raja brokered the deals for the eight companies and faces accusations that he took bribes and sold the licenses for less than the market value, with reports that he cost the government more than $40 billion in revenue.
Some of the companies affected in the decision include Loop, Idea Cellular, Tata Telecom, Uninor, Videocon, Vodafone, and Swan.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, a member of the Indian Parliament and the head of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, praised the decision, saying that it dealt a decisive blow to corruption that has plagued the country. He called the scandal “the most shameful and worst scam since independence” more than 50 years ago, according to a statement.
Prasad accused Prime Minister Manmohan Sighn and Home Minister P. Chidambaram, who was the country’s finance minister in 2008, of knowing about the scandal. “An investigation into the role of the then finance minister is very important,” he said.