NEW DELHI: The cumulative winning price at the end of the 108th round on the 27th day raced up to Rs 1155 crore in the e-auction for the first batch of FM Phase III cities, with cities Ahmednagar, Sholapur and Hissar marching forward and focus remaining on the smaller cities.

After a week, there was an increase of two in the number of channels - 96 channels in 56 cities – and the total bids surpassed the cumulative reserve price by Rs 695.5 crore or 151.2 per cent against the aggregate reserve price of about Rs 459.5 crore.

The cumulative provisional winning price has thus risen over the total reserve price of the first batch of 135 FM channels in 69 existing cities - Rs 550.18 crore – by Rs 604.8 crore or 109.9 per cent.

Varanasi continued to march higher to Rs 16,80,93,672, and Jodhpur also showed a jump to Rs 11,44,39,124, while Kolhapur was stable with Rs 9,44,24,489. Others in the waiting for entry to the Rs ten crore club appear to be Kanpur, Rajkot, Amritsar and Aurangabad which have all got above Rs seven crore each.

One channel in Guwahati had fetched a price of Rs 4, 11, 11,243 against its reserve price of just Rs 37 lakh, registering a rise of almost of 980 percent. A few days earlier, Bhubaneswar had also set a record with a single channel getting the most competitive bidding increment-wise (Rs 7,40,13,559) by going up nine times the reserve price.

The winning price has risen by more than 100 per cent above their respective reserve prices in Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Aurangabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneshwar, Chennai, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kolhapur, Mumbai, Nashik, Patna, Pune, Rourkela and Varanasi, all of which got provisional winning bidders at prices more than double the respective reserve prices.

The following Table summarises 27 days of bidding:

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