Did the PMO knowingly push the deal and then back out?
The PMO insists it got to know about the deal in July 2010, and then supported moves to annul it.
It definitely knows.If it denies it is not governing at all.
There’s no loss to the exchequer yet. So why is the PMO on the defensive?
Space is part of the PM’s beat, leaving him vulnerable. Also, Devas’s untested technology was causing disquiet as it could potentially affect future plans of existing telcos.
His personal integrity is coming under attack. Spotlight on 2G spectrum scam—and the proximity to the PM—worked against the deal. The PM had to clear the air.
So, is this a scam?
Doesn’t seem to be one. The Antrix-Devas contract is legal and procedures were followed when it was signed in January ’05.
Perfectly legal.Antrix lost the Bribe it has paid as well.
Why then was it cancelled?
The government is yet to give a concrete reason beyond “national needs” and “country’s strategic requirements”.
National needs is somebody’s needs.
Is there nothing wrong in ISRO’s dealings with Devas?
Some experts say the deal was loaded in Devas’s favour, with easy payment terms and a hedge against market risk. But then, there were no takers for S-band when the contract was signed.
Yes.Some made money and the Scientist honchos walked in blindfolded.
What next?
Yes, of course, Devas will go to the courts. The government will have to change the Satcom policy and compensate.
R.I.P.
Is the PM safe?
As long as no clear link emerges between his office and the deal.
Perfectly, irrespective of who comes to power.
ISRO claims to have ordered a review in 2009. Around this time, media reports about irregularities in the deal had surfaced. Yet, Antrix continued its talks with Devas on the project till a few weeks ago. “We were in talks with Antrix for hiring a third-country launch vehicle for the satellites till the third week of January,” Devas president & CEO Ramachandran Vishwanathan told Outlook. There are other apparent contradictions. While there are reports that the Space Commission and the Department of Space were kept in the dark, Antrix executive director K.R. Sridhara Murthi wrote to the Devas CEO in February 2, 2006, stating that it had “received the necessary approval for building, launching and leasing the capacity of S-band satellite….” A copy of the letter is withOutlook. Obviously, the approval would have come either from ISRO or the Space Commission or both.
So, what could have suddenly made the prime minister so vulnerable that he had to take defensive action, namely, the press conference? “Things have changed. All of a sudden, you find there are many takers and S-band is more valuable than ever thought,” say PMO sources. Indeed, Devas’s planned services could yield some answers. “Devas’s service through a satellite transponder would have been competitive with 4G. It could have been game-changer for the sector,” says Dinayar Contractor, a cable and satellite expert. This was seen as a potential spoiler for operators who have spent thousands of crores of rupees for 3G and BWA/LTE spectrum.
With India still in the pre-consultation stage for 4G services, Devas’s service could actually supersede many levels and render many of the existing companies’ investments redundant. Currently, a portion of S-band spectrum is being used for 4G terrestrial cellular services in some countries. “This could potentially happen in India as well, but not anytime soon. Widespread 4G services should be preceded by full-fledged 3G services, which is still in a nascent stage in India,” says a source close to ISRO.
Indian politicians might be negotiating to get the Technology and planning to award it to foreign firms the illegal way like 2G and S Band.
A new cyberweapon could take down the entire internet – and there’s not much that current defences can do to stop it. So say Max Schuchard at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and his colleagues, the masterminds who have created the digital ordnance. But thankfully they have no intention of destroying the net just yet. Instead, they are suggesting improvements to its defences.
Schuchard’s new attack pits the structure of the internet against itself. Hundreds of connection points in the net fall offline every minute, but we don’t notice because the net routes around them. It can do this because the smaller networks that make up the internet, known as autonomous systems, communicate with each other through routers. When a communication path changes, nearby routers inform their neighbours through a system known as the border gateway protocol (BGP). These routers inform other neighbours in turn, eventually spreading knowledge of the new path throughout the internet.
A previously discovered method of attack, dubbed ZMW – after its three creators Zhang, Mao and Wang, researchers in the US who came up with their version four years ago – disrupts the connection between two routers by interfering with BGP to make it appear that the link is offline. Schuchard and colleagues worked out how to spread this disruption to the entire internet and simulated its effects.
Surgical strike
The attack requires a large botnet – a network of computers infected with software that allows them to be externally controlled: Schuchard reckons 250,000 such machines would be enough to take down the internet. Botnets are often used to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which bring web servers down by overloading them with traffic, but this new line of attack is different.
“Normal DDoS is a hammer; this is more of a scalpel,” says Schuchard. “If you cut in the wrong places then the attack won’t work.”
An attacker deploying the Schuchard cyberweapon would send traffic between computers in their botnet to build a map of the paths between them. Then they would identify a link common to many different paths and launch a ZMW attack to bring it down. Neighbouring routers would respond by sending out BGP updates to reroute traffic elsewhere. A short time later, the two sundered routers would reconnect and send out their own BGP updates, upon which attack traffic would start flowing in again, causing them to disconnect once more. This cycle would repeat, with the single breaking and reforming link sending out waves of BGP updates to every router on the internet. Eventually each router in the world would be receiving more updates than it could handle – after 20 minutes of attacking, a queue requiring 100 minutes of processing would have built up.
Clearly, that’s a problem. “Routers under extreme computational load tend to do funny things,” says Schuchard. With every router in the world preoccupied, natural routing outages wouldn’t be fixed, and eventually the internet would be so full of holes that communication would become impossible. Shuchard thinks it would take days to recover.
“Once this attack got launched, it wouldn’t be solved by technical means, but by network operators actually talking to each other,” he says. Each autonomous system would have to be taken down and rebooted to clear the BGP backlog.
Meltdown not expected
So is internet meltdown now inevitable? Perhaps not. The attack is unlikely to be launched by malicious hackers, because mapping the network to find a target link is a highly technical task, and anyone with a large enough botnet is more likely to be renting it out for a profit.
An alternative scenario would be the nuclear option in a full-blown cyberwar – the last resort in retaliation to other forms of cyberattack. A nation state could pull up the digital drawbridge by adjusting its BGP to disconnect from the internet, just as Egypt did two weeks ago. An agent in another country could then launch the attack, bringing down the internet while preserving the attacking nation’s internal network.
Sitting duck
Whoever launched the attack, there’s little we could do about it. Schuchard’s simulation shows that existing fail-safes built into BGP do little to protect against his attack – they weren’t designed to. One solution is to send BGP updates via a separate network from other data, but this is impractical as it would essentially involve building a shadow internet.
Another is to alter the BGP system to assume that links never go down, but this change would have to be made by at least 10 per cent of all autonomous systems on the internet, according to the researchers’ model, and would require network operators to monitor the health of connections in other ways. Schuchard says that convincing enough independent operators to make the change could be difficult.
“Nobody knows if it’s possible to bring down the global internet routing system,” says Mark Handley, an expert in networked systems at University College London. He suggests that the attack could cause “significant disruption” to the internet, with an effect greater than the Slammer worm of 2003, but it is unlikely to bring the whole thing down.
“The simulations in the paper make a lot of simplifying assumptions, which is necessary to simulate on this scale,” he explains. “I doubt the internet would behave as described.”
ISRO Chief made the following observation in the press Conference on 8 February.
In 2004 a decision was taken to go in for KU band over S Band.On what grounds, no body is clear.
Suddenly ISRO finds S band has more potential.
Later it was decided to go in S band onan experimental basis.
Anrix , commercial arm of ISRO entered into an agreement with Devas Multi Media,Bangalore, for S Band services in 2005 and renewed in 2008 December..The contract was signed within 34 days from the approval from the board of Antrix.
In 2010, the under advice from Department of Space,it was decided to terminate deal by July 2010.
Questions are-
If monetary gains are not involved why should a Comapny invest?
If there is no guarantee of Business why would a Foreign investor be interested?
Foreign companies do pose a threat to national security in telecommunication.
Why was this allowed?
Normally commercial products are manufactured and market tie up is arranged by the organisation.
In innovative projects , the partners have a financial stake for equal weightage in contract in contracts of this nature.
Why was this not done in this case?
How is it that in this case you enter into commercial agreement, you manufacture with Public money ?
The process of termination is arduous and takes long, you say; don’t you have termination clause?
Kasturirangan says they are yet to find a reason for termination for nearly a year.
Then why terminate?
ISRO manufactures with out knowing the market after entering into contract , now plans to renege on the contract
Whhere does this leave the Devas, who are supposed to have earned nothing and a Foregn investor had come in for the love of Antrix.
Star war has a plasible script.
Blowing of the lid before it became operational,. Else the scam would have gone on.
Story:
Indian Space Research Organisation, under fire from all the quarters for the alleged S-band spectrum allocation scam, held a press conference late Tuesday evening clarifying their position. The press conference was chaired by Dr K Radhakrishnan, Secretary, Department of Space, and Dr K Kasturirangan, member of Planning Commission.
Emphasising that there was no question of revenue loss as clarified by the Prime Minister’s Office earlier, Dr K Radhakrishnan, Secretary, Department of Space said, “DoS put out a press note which clarifies that the agreements/contract between Antrix and Devas is already under review and a decision on the matter is likely to be taken soon.
“We have not yet terminated the Antrix-Devas contract. But, we began the process to annul the Antrix-Devas contract in July 2010. We have not allocated spectrum or satellite to either Devas or Antrix.”
ISRO wanted comprehensive review of the contracts in 2009. “The decision taken to annul the contract was due to strategic decisions. Terminating a contract is a very extensive and complex process. We followed the due process and even consulted the Law Ministry on this,” Dr Radhakrishnan, who is also the chairman of ISRO, added.
“We are not dilly-dallying. Internal review is going on and necessary action will be taken,” ISRO said defending itself. “ISRO is a reliable partner and is sought after by many countries across the world.”
PMO contradicts CAG report on S-band allocation
The Prime Minister’s Office today denied media reports alleging that the government had incurred losses in allocation of S-band spectrum, saying no decision has been taken on the issue and hence charges of revenue loss were without basis.
A statement from the PMO spokesperson stated that the office had seen media reports alleging loss of government revenue in a contract entered into by ANTRIX (the commercial arm of Indian Space Research Organisation) and Devas Multimedia Private Limited due to lease of space segment capacity which would use S-Band spectrum.
“The CAG’s office and Department of Space have already issued statements stating the factual position on the matter. It is further clarified that no decision has been taken by the government to allocate space segment using S-Band spectrum to ANTRIX or Devas. Hence, the question of revenue loss does not arise and any such reports are without basis in fact,” the PMO statement said.
Media reports had stated that the Department of Space, which comes directly under the Prime Minister, had allocated 70 MHz of S-Band spectrum to Devas Multimedia for Rs 1,000 crore. The actual value of this was estimated to be around Rs 2 lakh crore, the reports claimed.
The Opposition had demanded a clarification from the Prime Minister on the issue and immediate recovery of the lost revenue along with a thorough inquiry into the matter.
BJP had alleged that the allocation was done quietly and without bringing the issue into the public domain
The space department said the government had already put in motion the process of cancelling the agreement between Antrix and the Devas because it had not explicitly mentioned the end-use terms.
Addressing media persons here, Secretary (Space) K. Radhakrishnan and Planning Commission member K. Kasturirangan said that a decision had been taken to annul the agreement.
Radhakrishnan said that the agreement, which had been approved by the Antrix Corporation board in 2005, entailed the launch of two satellites. “In December 2009, the Department of Space decided to review the Antrix-Devas agreement and see how to meet the emerging strategic requirements of the country,” he said.
He said that the review process was carried out and the matter was subsequently taken up with the Space Commission. He said that the agreement did not explicitly mention that 90 percent of the capacity of the two satellites will be given to the contracting party and “the remaining will be used for our own purposes.”
Removal of Evil eye, Protection from forces that hinder Spiritual development. Protection from Black magic,Animals. Increases self confidence and self assurance. Clarity of thought.. Above all,Mukthi and Gnana are facilitated.
Date of Rig veda in Ramanisblog According to Ramanisblog, the date of the Rig Veda is subject to considerable debate, with modern scholarly estimates generally ranging between 2000 BCE to 1000 BCE[1]. However, Ramanisblog highlights that Hindu tradition considers the Vedas to be timeless and without a specific beginning[1]. Perspectives on Rig Veda Dating Ramanisblog Summary The core scholarly consensus, widely referenced by Ramanisblog, is the Rig Veda dates to between 2000 BCE and 1000 BCE, but tradition attributes an eternal status to the…
Following in the Ai Generated transcript of the Navavarana Pooja Mantras . Recorded and sent to my Shishyas. This is being made public so that this secret knowledge is not lost to posterity. Those who want to be initiated may contact me through mail at ramanan50@gmail.com. Also they can contact through the comment column. If Her directions are received, the Sri Vidya Aksharas will be initiated.Those with Panchadasakshari only can perform Navavarana Pooja. Anushtanad are to be observed. Achyuthaya namaha Ananthaaya namaharivikrama …..Achamana Mantras…
Tip of the iceberg,more to follow in these columns.
Taking note of reports that CAG is investigating the loss of nearly Rs 2 lakh crore in the allotment of scarce S-band spectrum, BJP on Monday asked Prime Minister to clear the air, initiate an inquiry and take steps to recover the lost revenue.
“This whole affair is vitiated by fraud. And as a result, this country is facing not only loss of revenue but frittering away of valuable national asset which is a rare spectrum,” BJP spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman said.
A newspaper report claimed CAG is investigating the allotment of 70 MHz from the available 2500 MHz of S-band spectrum to Devas multimedia for 20 years. The company is owned by M G Chandrasekhar, former scientific secretary at ISRO.
BJP demanded this agreement be immediately nullified and the spectrum space given to the private user be recovered.
“Secondly, we demand a comprehensive inquiry to establish the criminality in the whole matter. We also demand recovery of the lost revenue,” Sitharaman said.
The party alleged this is a “very serious scandal” as it involves a “very unique and rare” spectrum. It also said since the department of space is directly under the Prime Minister, he should immediately clarify his stand on the whole issue.
“The spectrum we are talking about is 5-G which relates to GHz. Recently, BSNL and MTNL were alloted only 20 MHz for Rs 12,487 Crore. But for allocation of 70 MHz to this private operator, the government is charging only Rs 1,000 Crore,” Sitharaman said.
Meanwhile, the office of CAG has clarified that its investigations into the issue are at a preliminary stage and the media reports should not be treated as findings of this department.
BJP also questioned the manner in which the spectrum was allocated without bringing the issue to the public domain.
“This is the first time the allocation for this band has taken place. It is a very unique band. Relates to a very high MHz frequency. And this allocation was done very quietly, without any public auctioning or bringing it in the public domain. And given to a private operator,” Sitharaman said.
She maintained that only 190 MHz of the S-band is available. Of this, 150 MHz is with the Department of Space and 70 MHz of this was alloted to Devas multimedia.
“2-G spectrum is much inferior. But 2-G spectrum related to only 4.4 MHz. CAG said here the loss was 1.76 lakh crore. 3-G is 50 MHz. Here due to media and public pressure, it went for auction. And the government’s revenue earning here was Rs 67,719 Crore,” Sitharaman said, drawing a comparison.
She alleged the loss due to this allocation of 70 MHz was Rs 2 lakh crore.
“From mid-2011, the commercial use of this spectrum is going to commence. The process of allocation was violated. Moreover, Devas Multimedia has also been given two custom-made satellites and 10 transponders for use.
Terming as “very serious” reports alleging that ISRO benefited a private firm through allocation of scarce S-band spectrum without a bidding process, Left parties on Monday demanded a thorough probe into the “new scam”.
“This is a new issue. The ISRO is under the department of space which is under Prime Minister ( Manmohan Singh). This is also a new scam,” CPM politburo member Sitaram Yechury told reporters here.
CPI national secretary D Raja said the new revelations were “very serious”, a view echoed by senior RSP leader Abani Roy who demanded a JPC into the matter.
“The revelations have added a new dimension to the 2G spectrum scam. The ISRO is directly under the control of department of space headed by the Prime Minister. It is very serious as ISRO deals with space and it has implications on our security,” Raja said.
He said the issue will be discussed among the four Left parties.
Another scam in the making, this one too deals with out-of-turn allocation of the S-band spectrum by Antrix to Devas without going through a formal bidding process. The CAG has questioned this move of the Department of Space of granting the spectrum to Devas, a private player that held immense potential commercially.
Devas enjoying the S-band gave the company unlimited leverage in the telecommunication space in terms of high speed mobile communication. It has to be remembered that the auction of just 15 Mhz of similar airwaves for 3G services led to the government gaining a whopping Rs 67,719 crores to its coffers. This is when the freebie deal 70 MHz enjoyed by Devas as part of satellite launch deal with ISRO comes under the scanner for a megre 1000 crore. This happened when industry bigwigs like MTNL and BSNL had to pay Rs. 12,847 crore for 20 Mhz.
A Rs. 600 crore deal, wherein the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) leased 60 Mhz of spectrum to little known Devas Multimedia five years ago is now under the scanner, reports the Economic Times, citing sources. We had written about Devas in the past, in 2008, when it received an approval from India’s FIPB for raising $75.75 million from German major Deutsche Telekom, thus valuing the company at $443 million. At that time, the company didn’t even have a website, and very little could have been ascertained about them, and what they were planning to do.
The legitimacy of the deal is being questioned. Devas seeks to offer data services to mobile terminals – streaming video, audio, web access, on PC data cards, mobile phones, and vehicle-mounted devices.
ET quotes anonymous executives offering two opposing sides to this issue of allocation of spectrum:
– That ISRO was not authorized to lease out the spectrum, and a probe into the Devas deal began when demands were made for broadband spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band to be auctioned.
– That Devas took a risk by leasing this spectrum, when no one else was willing to, and invested close to $300 million in order to launch services, and one can’t penalize the company just because the value of its spectrum as appreciated.
According to Devas’ website:
– It was founded by MG Chandrasekhar, and ISRO veteran
– Has been funded by Deutsche Telekom, Columbia Capital and Telcom Ventures.
– It has on its board of directors, Kiran Karnik from NASSCOM and Satyam Computers, as well as executives from ISRO / Antrix Corporation, Sirius XM Satellite Radio, Warburg Pincus.
Our take on this deal is that if a deal was inked by an agency not authorized to license spectrum, then it is invalid from the very beginning. That’s what the government and courts will have to determine. A lot of money – $300 million according to an ET source – has been invested over a long period of time. Either this deal will be legitimized (if it is indeed not legit), or heads will roll.
The other, perhaps more important point to note, is that according to the ET report, Devas is on the verge of launching services. Telecom operators have paid a lot more money for 3G and BWA spectrum, so perhaps there may be a move to delay or prevent Devas’ launch by questioning the legitimacy of the deal.
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