India's prime minister acts to tighten cyberlaws

BANGALORE, INDIA - India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh instructed government officials Wednesday to hasten the amendments to the country's Information Technology Act of 2000. The National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) in Delhi has for the last two years been pressing the government to amend the act to include additional clauses that tighten provisions relating to data security and privacy.

The prime minister called a meeting Wednesday with Kiran Karnik, president of NASSCOM, and with government officials to review steps taken by the government and by industry to deal with the challenge of cybercrime and to ensure data secrecy in the business data processing industry, according to a statement Wednesday from the government's Press Information Bureau (PIB) in Delhi.

The meeting was held in the context of a recent "media sting operation" involving an employee of a private data processing company, where allegations of breach of data secrecy have been leveled, added the PIB statement. Indian professionals have built for themselves an enviable global reputation through hard work, dedication and commitment, and the occasional misguided acts of some individuals should not be allowed to damage the high reputation of all professionals, Singh said, according to the statement.

The London tabloid The Sun reported last week that one of its reporters, operating undercover, was sold top secret information on 1,000 U.K. bank accounts by one Karan Bahree in Delhi, who said he had picked up the data from contacts at call centers in Delhi. A number of U.K. and U.S. banks and other organizations outsource call-center work to third-party operations or their own subsidiaries in India.

The PIB statement quoted Karnik as expressing concern that the incident reported by The Sun may have been a "sting operation" directed to give Indian industry a bad name against the background of its growing competitiveness.

Between April 1, 2004 and March 31, 2005, the country's exports from business process outsourcing, call centers, and related services grew by 44.5 percent to $5.2 billion.

In a statement issued to reporters on Monday, Bahree said he was set up by two other persons, including a local freelance reporter for The Sun. He did not know the contents on the CD that he was asked to give to Oliver Harvey, The Sun reporter who posed as an investor interested in learning about India's call center industry, Bahree said in the statement. Harvey paid him $5,000 and promised him a job in his call center, Bahree said in his statement, which was issued by his former employer, Infinity eSearch, a Web services company in Gurgaon, India, near Delhi.

Bahree has not been arrested, as the Indian police have as yet to receive a formal complaint from the call center companies where the information was allegedly stolen, or from the affected banks or customers in the U.K., said a Gurgaon police official. The official, who declined to be named, said the police started its own investigations.