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The Supreme Court has declined to receive an application by the Centre to allow the administrative allocation of spectrum.
The Registrar found the application for clarification misconceived.
Spectrum, a scarce natural resource, is allocated to private players only through open, transparent auction.
The law was laid down on this issue by the Supreme Court 12 years ago in the 2G spectrum judgment.
The Registrar invoked Order XV Rule 5 of the Supreme Court Rules, 2013 to decline the application.
Under this provision of the 2013 Rules, the Registrar may refuse to receive a petition on the ground that it discloses no reasonable cause or is frivolous or contains scandalous matter.
Spectrum allocation
Frequency allocation (spectrum allocation) is the part of spectrum management dealing with the designation and regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum into frequency bands, normally done by governments in most countries.
Because radio propagation does not stop at national boundaries, governments have sought to harmonise the allocation of RF bands and their standardization
Devices such as cellphones and wireline telephones require signals to connect from one end to another.
These signals are carried on airwaves, which must be sent at designated frequencies to avoid any kind of interference.
The Union government owns all the publicly available assets within the geographical boundaries of the country, which also include airwaves.
With the expansion in the number of cellphone, wireline telephone and internet users, the need to provide more space for the signals arises from time to time.
To sell these assets to companies willing to set up the required infrastructure to transport these waves from one end to another, the central government through the DoT auctions these airwaves from time to time.
These airwaves are called spectrum, which is subdivided into bands which have varying frequencies.
All these airwaves are sold for a certain period of time, after which their validity lapses.
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