The government’s proposal to have free access to all business electronic mails will undermine confidence among corporates, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) has said while calling for guidelines to ensure that any access granted is lawful and the scope for misuse is removed.

“Granting sweeping access to all business communications is impractical and completely contrary to how businesses are conducted anywhere in the world,” said D.S. Rawat, Secretary General of ASSOCHAM, in a letter to Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology.

No company wants its infrastructure to be misused by terrorists, said Rawat. However, companies will be willing to cooperate in any investigation where interception sought is lawful and a clear case has been established of possible involvement in anti-national activity.

But conflicting signals about the use of encryption in modern businessto-business correspondence and its lawful access is one of the major concerns for global companies doing business in India. Foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows into India were 25 per cent down to US$17 billion in April to January 2010-11 from US$22.9 billion in the year-on period.

“Unfortunately, this lack of uniformity is confusing and counter-productive to India’s goals of financial inclusion. The global standard today is 256-bit encryption and commercial enterprises in India should not be isolated and denied this level of security when other countries are moving in this direction.”

The success of India’s 76 billion dollar information technology and business process outsourcing industry is in many ways the backbone of country’s global competitiveness. But unless companies outside India are assured integrity of their data will never be compromised, they will simply move business to other destinations like China, the Philippines and others, said Rawat.

India has over 11 million broadband users and 700 million mobile phone users. Emerging trends like electronic commerce (using internet) and mobile commerce (using mobile phones will increasingly become more pervasive in future.