Says Union Home Secretary G K Pillai

Even as the January 31 deadline to ban BlackBerry services in India expired on Sunday, the Centre is still undecided on whether to clip the wings of an adamant Research In Motion (RIM).

Union home secretary G K Pillai told MiD DAY that no decision has been taken about whether the Canada-based company would be allowed to continue offering its services in India.

In a press conference yesterday, Union home minister P Chidambaram said, "RIM has given us a solution to the messenger service. We will insist that they give us the solution for the enterprise service too."

Chidambaram said he expected that RIM would be able to offer some solution to the home ministry to intercept and monitor its corporate email service.

"I think a decision will be taken by the ministry of home affairs and the telecom ministry. I have not yet been briefed on developments in the last few days," Chidambaram added.

He was reacting to RIM vice-president Robert E Crow's statement, a couple of days ago, saying, "There is no possibility of us providing any kind of a solution. There are no keys to be handed.

It's not possible to do so because the keys of the service are in possession of the corporate enterprises.

BlackBerry represents a very small fraction of the total population of VPN (virtual private networks) in India. There may be more than a million VPNs in India with high security architecture."

Repeated efforts to contact Union telecom secretary R Chandrashekhar yielded no results.