Chinese mobiles to be useless by month-end

NEW DELHI: Around 30 million mobile phones - or about 8% of all mobiles in the country - will become useless by the end of this month. These are
unbranded Chinese mobiles that do not have IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) numbers and pose a serious security risk.

All mobile phone service users have been directed by the Department of Telecom (DoT) to disconnect these phones. In fact, two deadlines - January 6 and March 31 - have already been missed by the companies. Now they have undertaken to acquire the necessary equipment to track these phones by April 15 and discontinue their services thereafter - a process that is expected to take another 15 days, that is, by April 30.

Under law, all GSM phones are required to have a unique IMEI number that gets reflected at cell phone towers with which, if required, the location of a mobile phone user can be tracked. These Chinese phones, however, show up as a series of zeroes at cell towers or by their cloned IMEI number. Either way, they can’t be tracked.

The CBI first pointed out the risk to the Union home ministry which took up the issue with DoT. In turn, DoT has instructed service providers to disconnect all phones without IMEI numbers. The service providers, according to DoT sources, have dragged their feet "despite the obvious security risk to the country."

Service providers told TOI they needed to equip themselves with Equipment Identity Registers which would allow them to check if calls are from legal or fake phones. EIRs, they said, would be with all by April 15. The weeding-out will then begin.

8 lakh Chinese cells enter India every month

The security risk from unbranded Chinese mobiles, to be phased out by the end of this month, can be guaged from the fact that a number of bombs have been triggered by terrorists by these phones. Mobile phones are part of terrorists’ essential equipment, for getting instructions from their handlers or for passing on information. If they use legal phones, their location can be found by IMEI numbers.

To give an example, after the Mehrauli blast the terrorists melted away without a trace. However, assuming that they had mobile phones, it should have been possible to track them down by zeroing in on all the phones that started to move away from the blast site immediately after the bomb went off. Instead of blindly putting roadblocks across the city, the security forces could have pinpointed all suspicious post-blast movements and caught the terrorists.

Security forces believe that, as it appears in the Mehrauli case, terrorists have taken to these unbranded Chinese phones to mask their movements. Currently, about 7-8 lakh Chinese phones come into the country every month. This figure was much higher before the talk of their ban started - in September 2008, 1.5 million of these phones came into India.

Naturally, not all of them are used by terrorists (only their easy availability makes them readily available). These phones are popular with consumers because of their low cost, often less than half the price of branded phones. That’s why service providers are seeking time to inform these users to change their handsets.

Sources in the home ministry, which first took up the issue with DoT in August last year, said "the problem of combination of IMEI numbers" has forced DoT to recognise the security risk and order a blanket ban on them.

"Combination of IMEI numbers", or many phones with the same IMEI number, happen because the number is cloned in lots of 100, 1,000 or 5,000 phones by makers of unbranded Chinese mobile phones. This makes it impossible to trace a call or to locate a particular phone.