Attempting to make the country?s communications network safe and legally interceptible too, the draft New Telecom Policy hopes to boost the development and production of telecom equipment in the country. ?The policy will encourage domestic production of telecom equipment by meeting 80% of India?s demand and the value addition by 65% by 2020?, Sibal said while outlining one of the cornerstones of the national security policy initiative.
There would also be preferential market access to domestically manufactured equipment, the minister said.
Maintaining secure communication systems and also ensuring legal interception of all communications has increasingly become one of the priorities for the government, and the NTP 2011 hopes to create an institutional framework to ensure that all communication is safe and at the same time can be legally intercepted by the law enforcement agencies.
At the heart of this is the stalemate between the government and the Canadian smartphone manufacturer, Research In Motion (RIM). The government has been asking the company to enable it to decrypt the communication on the BlackBerry?s enterprise services, which the company has flatly refused.
Trying to address the issues of legal interception, the policy will specifically mandate the telecom service providers to provide assistance to law enforcement agencies through regulatory measures in tune with national needs, keeping in view individual privacy and in line with international practices.
Unable to check the imports, the security agencies had even rounded up foreign telecom equipment manufacturers, like Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Siemens network and ZTE, and asked them to submit self-certification claiming that their equipment that is being imported were free of spyware and malware.
?These security concerns have prompted the government to encourage building of national capacity in all areas, specifically security standards, security testing, interception and monitoring capabilities and manufacturing of critical telecom equipment, that impinges on telecom network security and communication assistance for law enforcement?, the draft says.
It emphasises that in order to ensure security in an increasingly insecure cyber space, indigenous manufactured multifunctional SIM cards with indigenous designed chips incorporating specific, laid down standards are critical. The whole electronics ecosystem for this and other purposes, starting from the wafer fab needs to be built and hence is viewed as a key policy objective and outcome.