New Delhi/Srinagar, Oct 30 (Inditop.com) The union home ministry Friday banned pre-paid mobile phone connections in Jammu and Kashmir over “serious security concerns” following reports that militants were getting SIM cards on fake identities.
“I said this in Sriangar at the All India Editors’ Conference. Pre-paid connections are prone to misuse. I have no problem if there are pre-paid connections in the rest of India. But then there is a security situation (in Kashmir). We think that pre-paid connections are prone to misuse,” Home Minister P. Chidambaram told reporters in New Delhi.
“The ministry of home affairs has decided that no prepaid mobile connection would be issued and existing prepaid SIM cards would not be renewed in Jammu and Kashmir after Nov 1, 2009,” an official communique said.
The home ministry has asked the Department of Telecommunications to take appropriate action to implement the decision.
The move to ban the service “comes in the wake of reports that proper verification is not being done while providing such prepaid mobile connections by the service providers and vendors. In some cases, a single person had been issued with multiple number of connections”, the home ministry said.
The state police early this year had found that an IED was triggered in north Kashmir using a mobile phone that had a SIM card issued in the name a senior army officer in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district. An army officer was injured in the blast.
“Fake documents and identity cards are being used by the vendors, particularly in the case of prepaid connections. This situation has given rise to serious security concerns. Hence, the decision,” the ministry said.
Police in the insurgency-hit state have found that pre-paid connections were being used by militants to stay in touch with each other and also to use cell phones to trigger bombs.
The discovery of guerrillas getting mobile phone SIM cards on fake documents has rung alarm bells for security and intelligence agencies in Kashmir who say that private telecom service providers were “overlooking security parameters to push their sales”.
The use of mobile phones to explode IEDs is one of the easiest and widespread means of attacking security forces as the militant after planting the IED can explode it from miles away.
Jammu and Kashmir does not have any roaming facility for pre-paid mobile connections bought elsewhere in India.
An estimated four million mobile phone subscribers, mostly having pre-paid service, are in the state. Security agencies, including the army, had initially expressed reservations about mobile phones and expressed fears that militants could misuse them.
The terror-ravaged state got its cellular phone service by the state-run BSNL in 2003. Private operators came a year later.
Militants in the state are reported to be using mobile connections issued in the names of high ranking officials.
Police have unearthed quite a few cases of militants using pre-paid connections and arrested many people including in Doda, Kupwara and Srinagar.
Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) J.P. Singh, who is investigating a similar case, told Inditop in Jammu that private telecom operators were giving out additional SIM cards using names and documents of subscribers who were already using the service.
“All this is being done to push sales. Private cellular companies are forgetting something called corporate responsibility and are overlooking security parameters which can be very dangerous,” the police officer said.
Security agencies are worried since they don’t know the actual figures of how many such SIM cards have landed in the hands of terrorists. Meanwhile, the telecommunication department has restarted physical verification of customers’ documents submitted to it by private operators.
