Top telecom leaders kept up pressure on the government for the second day on Thursday after putting up their case before the telecom minister Kapil Sibal, home minister P Chidambaram, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and government officials on Wednesday.

The chief executives of Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Telenor owned Uninor and Videocon on Thursday held a joint media briefing and warned the government that if TRAI’s recommendations are accepted, it would lead to the 100 percent increase in the call rates. They call TRAI’s suggestions a death knell for the telecom industry.

“The telecom industry is already impacted with high debts and shrinking margins and the TRAI’s recommendations would only make things worse”, said Sanjay Kapoor, CEO Bharti Airtel.

"The implications of this change could be anywhere as high as 100% of the existing rates, which would have to be compensated by customers," Kapoor said, adding, "This would vary from circle to circle. We know this could play havoc in a price sensitive market like ours."

He said that the TRAI’s argument that this would only lead to 2 paise a minute annually is not realistic. He termed it as "away from reality". He said mobile telephony prices could jump even higher if re-farming was taken into account.

Rajiv Bawa, chief representative officer of Telenor, said that TRAI’s suggestions on spectrum auction are not in line with Supreme Court’s order which directed the government to redistribute all the 122 licences that were cancelled.

"Even before discussing price, this first has to be an auction that obeys the Supereme Court order," said Bawa.

"The Court did not intend to evict new operators from India. In fact, its explicit directions were to allow us to win back our licenses through auctions. These recommendations are in effect asking the government to evict all but one new operator." He added.

The telecom chiefs also demanded that base price of spectrum be reduced by 80% and all available spectrum should be put out for auction to prevent creation of artificial scarcity and allow the market to discover its true price.

Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) recently proposed a minimum or base price of Rs 3,622.18 crore for every mega Hertz of spectrum in the 1800 MHz band, where radio airwaves have been vacated following the Supreme Court’s verdict on February 2 cancelling all the 122 spectrum licences allotted in 2008 during the tenure of the former telecom minister A Raja.