Chinese manufacturers selling telecom equipment to India will have to agree to third-party verification of their plants, besides submitting their software code to the government for examination. They will also have to give an undertaking that their equipment does not contain any malware.

The Union home ministry which proposed the guidelines has also identified 14 international third-party certifiers from whom the vendors must get security validation. The proposal aims to clear the logjam over Chinese equipment imports.

According to a top home ministry official, the proposal, which has been sent to the department of telecommunications (DoT) for approval, says that certifiers will have to visit manufacturing plants of Chinese firms like Huawei, ZTE and others to verify there?s no spyware or other malware sneaked into their equipment.

?We have sent the proposal to DoT; once they ratify it, we would announce the norms,? the official said. The proposals, once they are official, will be a relief for the Chinese vendors as well as for domestic telecom operators. Telecom players and Chinese vendors would have to enter into model agreements with the government, which would be drawn up on the above lines.

Thereafter, the home ministry would not have any role and the matter would be dealt by the DoT.

As earlier reported by FE, the Chinese vendors will have to submit the equipment software code to the government. The code would be kept in an escrow and the National Informatics Centre under the department of information technology would study it if malware is suspected.

In the absence of mandatory security checks, virtually no Chinese equipment consignment has been cleared in the past seven months, impacting expansion plans of domestic telecom players.

The import impasse began last December when DoT stipulated that a security clearance must be obtained before placing a purchase order for telecom equipment or software. However, to ensure that such a move does not hamper companies? expansion plans due to red-tapism, it also said that if the government did not raise any objections within a 30-day period, the consignment would be deemed to be cleared. However, in practice, the system has not worked that way. Operators including Tata Teleservices have complained to the DoT several times over the delay in clearing equipment.