NEW DELHI, Oct 7: The body representing India’s booming outsourcing business insisted on Saturday that the country was a safe place to do business following a British TV news sting showed alleged call centre fraud.

Britain’s Channel 4 aired a documentary on Thursday purporting to show how the data of thousands of British customers could be stolen and sold by call centre employees for as little as 15 dollars.

“Security is a number one priority,” said the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCON) president Kiran Karnik, in a statement.

He cited a recent investigation of call centres in India by Britain’s Banking Codes Standards Board which found that ‘customer data (in India) is subject to the same level of security as in the UK’.

Karnik’s comments came after Britain’s privacy watchdog announced it would probe charges by the Channel 4 Dispatches programme that made headlines in Britain. It said it was concerned by any breaches of security, particularly if they involved confidential banking details.

The TV programme showed people offering to sell credit card numbers, passwords and other information obtained from Indian call centres.

NASSCOM, which represents India’s 24-billion-dollar information technology and outsourcing industry, is anxious to safeguard the sector’s reputation from any allegations that India is lax on security.

The group said it had written to the British programme makers requesting their “immediate cooperation” and to provide details of the allegations “that would have enabled prompt action against the alleged criminals.”

But it said they had refused to cooperate.

The software body said “an investigation by the Indian police is already well underway.”

“We take any alleged breach of security extremely seriously. The fact there was no suggestion of customers suffering financial loss in Dispatches’ report does not diminish the priority we give to all security issues,” Karnik said.

New planned legislation to strengthen India’s already-tight (data protection) laws would “ensure the globally best cyber environment,” he added.—AFP