SRINAGAR, FEBRUARY 15 Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Bharti Airtel have launched a massive re-verification campaign of all the mobile phone SIM cards issued in Kashmir since the inception of the service in 2003 to check its widespread misuse by militants in the Valley. The process started soon after police exposed a major racket of using fake identification of army personnel to procure SIM cards for use by militants.

“We are in the process of reverifying the antecedents of around 4 lakh customers in the Valley after a directive from the BSNL headquarters,” BSNL Deputy General Manager Sidharth Pokharna said, adding “It will be completed in a month.” Pokharna said BSNL had issued SIM cards in bulk and in a hurry when mobile service was introduced in the Valley in 2003. “At that time, there was a lot of public pressure to issue mobile phones as the service was introduced late in the Valley. We are conducting the re-verification from the very beginning,” he said. “The problem is mostly in the pre-paid sector”.

BSNL has around 6 lakh customers — almost half of the entire cell phone population of J-K. It has five franchises and 114 sub-franchises across Kashmir. In fact, Bharti Airtel too has started a strict re-verification of its customers to plug the holes for security concerns as several of its SIM cards were recovered from militants.

The J-K Police has intensified its own verification campaign after a road side bomb triggered by a mobile phone in December last year in Baramulla was tracked to a fake army man. “We have come across several cases where SIM cards have been issued on fake identifications,” Additional DGP Kuldeep Khuda said. “We have been asking the service providers to follow certain regulations strictly to stop it”. Khuda said that the police recently recovered 78 SIM cards from a man and has already booked him and the SIM retailer under Public Safety Act. “Fortunately, those SIM cards were seized before their use,” he said. “And several of them were in the fake names of armymen”.