The Telecom Quagmire

All of us are well aware of how the Government of India is dragging its feet.. actually.. its whole body over the allocation of 3G spectrum to private players. The process was started a couple of years ago and all indications point towards it carrying on for another couple.. by which time, the currently vibrant telecom space in India might just lose all the sheen and promise it holds for Telecom majors the world over (as is already apparent by the fact that no private player was present on the 1st day of renewed calls of discuss on 3G bandwidth allocation by the government). For the uninitiated, 3G stands for 3rd generation telephony which, among other things would enable faster broadband services and greater voice quality.
But then, one might ask what are the first two generation technologies in mobile telephony and also, is 3G the latest thing or are some service providers trying same other, more advanced technologies as well?
What follows is whatever little I know about the various generations of affore mentioned technology
1G - The 1st generation, analogue communications, impossible tariffs, bad voice quality, no data carrying capacities, never came to India
2G - The technology we use currently, average voice quality and data speeds.
3G - Better voice quality, high speed net, but uses huge bandwidths.
4G - Yes, it exists, and is just starting to come out of the labs and into a few European and East Asian countries apart from the U.S., highly efficient, can work on 2G spectrum bands itself, extremely fast, live T.V. on the go would be an everyday thing, cheap, works with both GSM as well as CDMA networks and the list goes on.

So, the question which now arises is why is the Government of India in general and the TRAI in particular not following logic it used way back in 1995 when it leapfrogged to using the 2G networks instead of the analogue and introduce 4G networks instead of 3G. Why is one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world being faced with a very real possibility of having to use outdated technology when better and cheaper alternatives are available? Would we in the coming months see some inspired decisions being made or will Telecom also be relegated to the fates of countless other industries in India which started with a bang but stagnated and become 'bimaroo' soon?

Sources: The Economic Times of India: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G
http://www.telecomreview.ca/eic/site/tprp-gecrt.nsf/vwapj/4GMobile.pdf/$FILE/4GMobile.pdf