The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) may provide value added service (VAS) providers access to information related to the location of a handset as a part of the National Telecom Policy (NTP) 2011.
Once approved, the service has the potential to locate lost handsets, tracking people anywhere in the country, by feeding the mobile number into a web application even if the handset is not GPS enabled.
The content enablement provision of the NTP 2011, lays down the guidelines for VAS service providers for providing content such as MMS, SMS, etc, over mobile phones.
The government is, however, contemplating how much information related to location of a mobile phone can be given out to public keeping in mind privacy issues and security concerns.
