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| Prepaid cell phone ban to continue | | |
ABID SHAH
NEW DELHI, JAN 8: Supreme Court has been told by the Central Government that its ban on the pre-paid mobile connections in the troubled State of Jammu and Kashmir would continue as terrorists were widely using these connections for their anti-national activities.
The Centre maintained that most of these pre-paid connections were being used by the terrorists after being obtained on fake identities and addresses.
The Centre told the Court that it has been found that there was a wider prevalence of the use of pre-paid mobile connections by terrorist elements in comparison to the post paid mobile connections which were found to be rarely misused.
The Centre’s affidavit cited an incident when a SIM card used by the militants to target an army convoy was registered under a fake name.
A Supreme Court bench was told today by the Solicitor General of India (SGI) Gopal Subramaniam, “We cannot revoke the ban. It is because of security reasons that the ban on pre-paid mobile services had been imposed,”
As the petitioner who is also the J&K National Panthers Party president Professor Bhim Singh sought the stay against the ban orders on pre-paid connections, the Court said that it would hold further hearing of the case on January 25th.
The Court asked the petitioner to file its reply to the Centre’s affidavit. Professor Singh said that he had filed some documents sourced from the government and sought Court’s direction to the Centre to file a reply to these documents. The Court chose not to make any directions on this prayer.
The 11-page-long affidavit filed by the Centre said that the government had several rounds of discussions with the Department of Telecommunication, security and intelligence agencies and the service providers before it decided to impose the ban.
The affidavit said that mobile telephone service providers were repeatedly advised to issue pre-paid connections only after a thorough verification of the applicant. However, it was found that service providers were not able to ensure complete verification of identities of the applicant for pre-paid connection, the affidavit noted.
The affidavit claimed that the decision to ban pre-paid mobile service was taken under the provisions of Unified Access Service (UAS) and Cellular Mobile Telecom Service (CMTS) licences.
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