Britain's BG and Norway's Statoil have won licences to exploit the bulk of the gas found so far.
Some institutions won licences through political connections, and returned the favour by lending money to ruling-party cronies.
That cost the Indian treasury an estimated $40 billion.To make matters worse, many of the firms that won licences appear not to have been qualified.
Cuadrilla, GDF Suez, Hutton Energy, UK Oil and Gas, and Aurora Energy Resources won licences; the biggest winner was Ineos, the Anglo-Swiss chemicals group, with 21 licences.
The group, which has already won licences for the cities of Cardiff, Bristol, and Newcastle, beat four other bidders for the right to broadcast the channel Made In Leeds.
Ineos plans to meet with local communities in the regions where they have won licences in an effort to bring them on side.
Centrica is among a group of oil and gas companies, including the local group Statoil, which have won licences from the Norwegian government.
Two firms won licences and then sold slices to foreign firms: Unitech, primarily a property company, was part-bought by Norway's Telenor; and nearly half of Swan Telecom was bought by Abu Dhabi's Etisalet ETEL.On November 29th Mr Raja's replacement, Kabil Sibal, said he would ask five firms why he should not strip them of 85 2G licences that they bought in 2008.
The licensing of non-essential patents has rapidly become a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter - of which almost all goes to Microsoft, which has demanded and won licences for its patents from almost all of the Android device makers marketing products outside China.
A few private firms won licences for coalfields which contained more coal than was needed for generating their own power.
J.P. Morgan Chase won licences from Beijing to offer foreign exchange services to Chinese customers and yuan services to foreign-invested firms, executives at the No. 2 U.S. bank said on Thursday.
