According to the raiding parties, from this evening itself, several of the flourishing illegal call-back services would have been disrupted. While there are hundreds of illegal call-back operators in the country -- the VSNL catches them from time to time, but they then change addresses -- all of them have to route their calls through a network, or a carrier. And this is what today's raid busted.

Today's raids were jointly conducted by VSNL, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, the EnforcementDirectorate and the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) in Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai. No arrests have been made so far as the owner of the operations is a US national and is untraceable. The company who's premises were raided and which conducted the call-back services is called Cyberfast Network Systems Corporation (CSNC).

Under a `call-back' service, users from India wishing to make a call to, say the US, call a local number which then connects them to the desired US number, and later bills them at a fraction of what one has to pay the VSNL. The way this is usually done is that a party which has a `dedicated' line to the US -- this facility is available from VSNL and is itself legal -- misuses this and allows outsiders to dial into this line and, then, connects them to the US. If calls have to be made to say, the UK, the user gets connected to the US, and then from there to the UK.

How lucrative this operation is can be judged from the fact that VSNL charges a mere Rs 15 lakh per year for providinga dedicated line, operators who misuse this can make crores. Dedicated lines are taken by several people such as computer companies or simply corporates who make a lot of telephone calls and want a secure and efficient telecommunication network. CSNC, for example, had a 512Kbps dedicated line from New Delhi to California.

Today's swoop showed that the three installations were completely unmanned, and had sophisticated equipment worth a few crores each, which actually routed the calls by using the dedicated VSNL line. Each of the installations had high-capacity modems which allowed most repairs/servicing of the network to be done through a telephone line. In all cases, some poorly-paid local help was hired to do some routine work. If, say 15 telephone lines went dead, then a message would be sent to the local help to have them repaired.

Interestingly, while VSNL says it has been writing to the DoT about the menace of call back services -- VSNL's international call traffic has been falling by around 5 percent per year due to diversion to such `call-back' service providers -- it has taken little concrete action so far. Indeed, while its agreement with users of such dedicated lines allows for a penalty of Rs 4.5 crore for such misuse, it does not ask for any bank guarantee for this amount. Nor has it built in any clause in the agreement which would allow it to monitor such illegal traffic and actually charge for it.

Today's swoop in fact, was based on the intelligence efforts of the Central Economic Intelligence Bureau (CEIB) and not the VSNL. What the CEIB did was to get a list all users of dedicated lines from the VSNL, and then match this with the MTNL directory to see how many MTNL phones each one of these companies had. When it found that some of these companies had a huge number of MTNL lines -- CSNC had 70 in Delhi alone -- it asked MTNL to provide billing details. In CSNC's case, in Delhi alone 62 lakh local calls had been made in the last 18 months.

Clearly, something was wrong. Several visits toits office in Bhikaji Cama Place in New Delhi showed that there were no visitors to the small one-room office, incidentally always kept locked and guarded. And since there were no people in the office, this clearly couldn't be a small-time `call-back' service provider -- it was clearly something larger. Telecom experts were consulted, and pointed that this was probably one of the networks through which the `call backs larger. Telecom experts were consulted, and pointed that this was probably one.