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 Hindustan Times Dec 16, 2020 By  Shishir Gupta Phone companies in India can only use telecom equipment certified by a top security panel to have come from a “trust source”, the Union Cabinet decided at its meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday. The certificate will be issued by a security panel headed by Deputy National Security Advisor Rajender Khanna who reports to NSA Ajit Doval. A former chief of India’s external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing, Khanna heads the technologies section in the National Security Council Secretariat, people familiar with the matter said. “This is a very important decision with respect to national security,” Union telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said as he unveiled the National Security Directive on Telecommunication Sector that had been cleared by the cabinet minutes earlier. The directive does not require phone companies to replace their existing equipment and will not impact ongoing annual maintenan...

The Telegraph Dated 02.12.2020 China on Wednesday frowned upon India’s repeated use of “national security” to ban Chinese apps and called for rectification of “discriminatory practices violating WTO rules’’. Responding to media queries for a Chinese reaction to India’s decision on Tuesday to ban another set of apps with links to China, the spokesperson at the Chinese Embassy here, Ji Rong, said: “We firmly oppose the Indian side’s repeated use of ‘national security’ as an excuse to prohibit some mobile applications with Chinese background.’’ The ministry of electronics & information technology (MEITY) had banned 43 mobile apps on Tuesday, taking the list of such apps banned since June to 220 as part of a series of measures New Delhi is taking as retaliation to China violating India’s territorial sovereignty.  New Delhi’s contention is that it cannot be business as usual given the prevailing situation along the line of actual control in eastern Ladakh where the face-off is into ...