Deadlines are seldom met by governments in India, so it came as no surprise to anyone when the December 31, 2009, deadline for implementing mobile number portability (MNP) in four metros was missed. Anyone tracking the pace with which decisions were being taken knew that this was going to happen. Not surprising again, a new deadline?March 31?has been fixed by the government for implementing MNP across the country. No prizes for guessing whether it will be met or not, because security agencies have once again raised the issue of compromising with national security. Our security agencies always tend to go into overdrive with several foreign investment proposals and technological innovations raising the bogey of national security. As a result, something as elementary as Internet telephony was restricted in India for long and is still not practised in its entirety. The same phobia has come to stall the implementation of MNP this time, thus depriving over 500 million mobile subscribers of a choice that technology provides in most developed nations.
The issue is simple: the agencies are concerned that the numbers, which are under surveillance, will be difficult to monitor as the mobile switching centres through which such an exercise is conducted would keep getting changed. The concern might not be unfounded but the issue is that a solution can be found. What it may however involve is working more innovatively and being in sync with changing technology rather than holding on to archaic ones.
But our security agencies don?t seem to think so. For instance, they often procrastinate over foreign investment proposals of those telecom companies which have operations in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Recently, the Norwegian telecom operator Telenor had to face obstacles as the ministry of home affairs simply refused to grant it permission since the company had operations in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
MNP is the one area in Indian telephony which involves no auction, no large sums of money transfer or any other controversy that has plagued the telecom sector in general. It would be sad to see even this simple policy change running into delays because of security concerns.
anandita.mankotia@expressindia.com