The department of telecom (DoT) swept aside the insecurity from BlackBerry services on Wednesday and the government too, allowed operations of Blackberry services in India.

The Blackberry services had come under the government scanner with the Ministry of Home Affairs and security agencies, insisting the maker of BlackBerry smartphones (Research-In-Motion), to intercept the data sent through these handsets because of the possibility of use of the unintercepted data by terrorists. The security agencies demanded that the data sent between BlackBerry users in India should not be transferred outside the country.

Telecom secretary, Mr Behura said that the operators such as Tata Teleservices and state-owned telcos, BSNL and MTNL, too, can launch BlackBerry services for their customers. “There is no permission needed for starting value- added services. We have not given permission to anybody, we have not disallowed anybody."      

Mr Behura’s had earlier contradicted DoT’s stance that no new operator would be permitted to launch BlackBerry services until all security issues were resolved. In fact, the Tatas were unable to launch this service for their customers last year as DoT did not allow them to start the services on security grounds.

However, the leading telecom operators refused to comment on Mr Behura’s statement.

Presently, India has over 1,15,000 BlackBerry customers between Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, BPL, Vodafone Essar and Idea Cellular.