THE TELECOM TRILEMMA REVISITED: COMPETITION LAW, THE STATE AS CREDITOR AND INDIA’S FOURTH MOBILE OPERATOR, 2016–2026

Between 2016 and 2019 the Indian mobile market went from twelve operators to four after a new entrant offered free and then very low-priced service. In 2020 a court-confirmed liability for licence fees put in question the survival of Vodafone Idea, whose auditors had reported material uncertainty about its going concern. Elsewhere such four-to-three questions have been decided in merger review; India met this one without a merger to review. Competition law applied its dominance threshold to the entrant’s pricing and, on the Supreme Court’s direction, left access disputes to the sector regulator first. The operator’s continuation coincided with decisions the Government took as creditor and shareholder, to which, alongside private capital, its own disclosures tie it. The article sets those decisions beside the operator’s cash flows, the OECD’s principles of competitive neutrality and the European private-creditor test. The number of operators held but concentration rose: the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index on subscribers went from 1,544 in 2016 to 3,280 in 2026 and combinations between operators account for between 506 and 958 points of the rise. It proposes four refinements to the resulting division of labour among the competition authority, the sector regulator and the State.