State Bank of India has asked the Department of Telecom to work out a bailout package for telecom operators, including a deferred payment for spectrum and rationalization of spectrum fee. SBI was prompted to do this as lenders have a total exposure of more than Rs 4 lakh crore to the sector, which could become stressed due to declining telecom revenues. In a letter to the DoT, SBI Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya has proposed a six-point action plan to address the sector's problems. "The stress in the sector has reached highly unsustainable levels after the entry of new players and launch of free services which led to the erosion of topline and EBITDA of the telecom service providers," Bhattacharya wrote. "The data with us suggests that the total EBITDA of the sector on annualized basis is Rs 65,000 crore which is... unsustainable for the debt of more than Rs 4 lakh crore," she said. SBI said telecom companies should be given 20 years, against 10 currently, to pay the full spectrum auction amount. It also pushed for a five-year moratorium, against two years currently. Noting that telecom operators currently pay nearly 30 percent of their revenues as taxes and levies, the bank said the DoT should waive the USO (Universal Service Obligation) fund levy, which is about 5 percent of the operators' revenues.