About 25 million handsets could be disconnected by telecom operators from January sixth onwards as the department of telecom (DoT) ordered them to cut off cell phones without an international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) number.

The move is likely to deter terrorist outfits to make use of mobile phone for their immoral acts, by assuring that no calls made are unidentifiable.

IMEI, an exclusive 15 digit code identifying a cell phone, prevents the use of stolen phones for making calls and therefore permits lawful interception of all calls.

Whenever a call is made, the IMEI number is reflected in the operator’s network.

DoT asked the telecom service providers to equip networks with Equipment Identity Register (EIR) in order to ensure whether calls are made from valid phones.

In a letter to operators on October 6, DoT said, “In the interest of national security, all cellular mobile service providers in unified access service licences (UASL) are hereby directed to make provisions for EIR so that calls without IMEI or with IMEI consisting of all zeroes are not processed or rejected.”

“If switches do not have such a facility, the necessary hardware and software should be put in place within three months of the issue date of this letter and compliance reported,” it added.

The mobile makers' industry body Indian Cellular Association (ICA) considers that banned IMEI handsets are being used as there is no proof of IMEI numbers in handsets coming in the country either via sea or air.

And also there is no central mechanism to forbid the use of stolen phones.

The majority of grey market phones, mainly coming from China, do not have real IMEI numbers.

ICA estimates that there are approximately 25 million such handsets in India.

But, a few operators showed their inability to meet up the DoT target owing to technical causes.

A senior official said, “What the DoT is trying to do is to block all calls with zeroes as IMEI numbers or from blacklisted numbers. That adds an extra load on networks. There are so many combinations of non-genuine IMEI numbers that it is extremely difficult to block them. Network upgradation is required to block all such calls and not all our multiple equipment vendors are equipped to do it.”

He also said that questioning all calls would holdup call set-up time.

“Switches will interrogate most of the time and may not be able to process any calls,” he added.