Cell firms ring off security

Faced with massive problems in verifying the identity of the nearly 80 million users of pre-paid connections, the country's mobile operators have decided to tell the government that they cannot complete this exercise on their own, that too within the five-month deadline expiring this October.

The Cellular Operators' Association of India will formally communicate this position to the government in a couple of days. Informally, the mobile industry brass has already said that even the department of posts' hit rate for verification is not more than 3 per cent, at best.

The problem is not limited to private operators like Tata, Bharti Airtel, Hutch, or Reliance Communications, but is also being faced by state-owned operators "" BSNL and MTNL.

The throwing up of hands by operators is a crucial development, as security agencies are riding their tail to speed up verification of India's 100 million users.

"This is easier said than done. Already, we have reasons to believe that 25-30 per cent of pre-paid users may turn out to be bad apples; in the sense that their address verification may not match due to various reasons," a senior executive with a leading mobile operator told Business Standard.

"We have tried all sorts of things, but the task of verifying and cross-checking over national security concerns cannot be handled in this way.

Business cannot be made responsible for identifying and verifying individuals - it is the sovereign's job to do that. We can only help, but what do you do when you don't have a robust and single-national-identity system?" COAI director general TV Ramachandran wondered.

Ramachandran pointed out that a similar verification drive undertaken in Singapore over the past seven months had resulted in only 70 per cent of the target being met.

The city state has only 4.38 million users, for a population of 4.34 million. In comparison, India adds nearly 4.5 million mobile users every month.

Compounding the situation is the slowing down of sales being experienced in rural and mofussil areas, where many people do not have valid identity proof and rely on a dealer "taking care" of this requirement.

That is why the industry is demanding that a national identity card, on the lines of the US social security number, be put in place.