Amid security concerns, the government on Friday said it has decided to establish a 'Centre for Telecom Testing and Security Certification' for development of the standards, procedures and test tools to test telecom equipment of all vendors.

"...to take care of national security concerns related to telecom network, the government has issued the amendment to various telecom licences on May 31, 2011, wherein it is mandated that all network elements should be tested and certified as 'safe to connect' before inducting these into network," Minister of State for Communications and IT Milind Deora said in a written reply to Rajya Sabha.

Earlier, the government had decided to conduct testing and certification of software and hardware of all foreign telecom companies. Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal had said that the decision had been taken in view of the fact that 70-80 per cent of telecom equipment are imported and have been deployed largely by the private service providers.

In order to perform 'testing' on recent generation of telecom hardware being manufactured world over, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore was entrusted with the job to set up a lab at an estimated cost of Rs 60 crore, of which Rs 50 crore would be funded by the government.

The IISc had simultaneously approached several vendors including Cisco, Juniper, Huawei from the US, Europe and Asia to share internal details of their telecom equipment like detailed design document and internal architecture which are vital for detailed testing.

In case of any breach of security, the service providers and vendors would be held responsible and it may lead to cancellation of their licences and imposition of hefty penalties. In order to set up domestic testing facility, the IISc had run a pilot project for Centre for Telecom testing and Security Certification.