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Comment by arocks | Hacker News Reader

Despite poor infrastructure in many areas, India has one of the best telecom infrastructure thanks to Sam Pitroda - the father of Indian telecom. From Wikipedia [1]:

"As technology Advisor to the Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi in the 1984s, Pitroda not only heralded the telecom revolution in India, but also made a strong case for using technology for the benefit of society through missions on telecommunications, literacy, dairy, water, immunization and oil seeds."

Getting a SIM card is intentionally hard partly due to their prevalence for terrorist activities (especially in its initial days when anyone could simply buy a SIM card from a store without any ID proof) and partly from the lack of a centralized electronic citizen identification system similar to SSN.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Pitroda

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Could you elaborate on why it is so hard to get a SIM? Here in Europe it couldn't be easier, and most providers give you the SIM for free if you buy a certain amount of airtime.

A few months ago in Ireland I got a new SIM from Three just for tethering. I went into the shop, gave them a €20 banknote, and got a SIM with unlimited data for a month. No ID or credit card required. I was a bit surprised myself. When I worked in a supermarket years ago we had to ask for ID when people bought TVs so they could be chased up if they didn't have a license.

It's not actually hard. It's just that the SIM cards not pre-activated. One needs to provide address and ID proof as per DoT (Department of Telecom, India) regulations, and SIM would be activated 24 hours later. The cost of SIM card itself is negligible.

Check chapter 1 here:

http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/userfiles/file/measures...

>Could you elaborate on why it is so hard to get a SIM? Here in Europe it couldn't be easier, and most providers give you the SIM for free if you buy a certain amount of airtime.

Many people don't have the required ID to get a SIM. So they used to have someone else buy them a prepaid SIM and then use it under that person's ID. In some cases, they'd do something illegal and finding the right person was painful.

There were many cases in the early days where people would use fake ID and buy postpaid phones. They'd use it as long as the operator would let them, without paying the bill. Rinse repeat the fake id. There were a bunch of folks who did this when we were at university - IIRC, they went through a half dozen handsets in 3 months and ran up large bills. There was an black market of sorts for such mobiles - buy it for Rs.500 (reliance), resell it for Rs.1000 and use it for Rs.10000+. People used to call in to one of these phones. the owner of the phone would then conference them on long-distance (expensive then) calls and international calls ;-)

Finally the terrorism thing, where the government said that wanted to avoid giving them an easy way to communicate. they also banned the hiding of one's number in the caller id because people were making too many crank calls and creating trouble.

At the end of it all, the rules mandate official ID proof. Activation needs a background verification to be done. While this does not work in reality, the number of postpaid dine-and-dash type situations have been reduced.

> Getting a SIM card is intentionally hard partly due to their prevalence for terrorist activities

Seriously? That sounds like the most idiotic excuse ever. Terrorists also eat chewing gum, so we're going to ask for ID and 24 hour waiting period before buying chewing gums?

In the UK (and probably many other countries), you can buy a SIM card in a grocery shop and it's activated instantly. Adding a data plan or call/sms package is as easy as using a shortcode or sending a SMS.

Terrorists cannot deploy bomb blasts using chewing gums

Unless they are worried about the bill, they can do that with SIMs that roam in India.

Except that, using Chewing gum you can do next to nothing to others, putting the gum in their hair is as disastrous as you can get. Using SIM cards however, you can co-ordinate a terrorist attack. In a country of a billion people tracing a phone number that is not verified by any identity is like looking for a needle in a haystack. It can be done, but takes a lot of time. So while systems similar to SSN are put in place, the govt has made it very hard to get a SIM, until a better system is in place.

Sometimes we feel bad. But finding exact terrorist out of 1200000000 many people is not so easy job :)

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