ORDER

By Aftab Alam, Chairperson –

This Petition is filed on behalf of two associations, [Cellular Operators Association of India (Petitioner No.1) and Association of Unified Service Providers of India (Petitioner No.2)] that jointly represent all the major telecom operators in the country; besides the two associations, two companies of the Bharti group are petitioners 2 and 3, eight companies of the Vodafone group are petitioners 3 to 11, two companies of the Reliance group are petitioners 15 and16, two companies of the Tata group are petitioners 17 and18, and three other telecom companies are petitioners 12, 13 and 14. Veritably thus, all the private operators in the telecom sector have come together to question and assail the action of the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) in imposing penalty for non-submission of EMF radiation self-certificate for the “new” Ba sic Transceiver Stations (BTS) sites by the due date. The penalty is at the rate of rupees five lakh for each BTS but as the number of stations held liable for imposition of penalty is very large, the total amount of penalty against each of the operators runs into huge figures. Needless though to say, that before the T