Over the past week, the police has been raiding the electronic markets of Agra and Firozabad towns, confiscating grey-market mobile handsets manufactured in China and taking resellers into custody to interrogate them about the identity of importers.

The reason the police provides is quite vague. According to the local resellers, the police has been cracking down on sellers as well as importers of Chinese mobiles at the Shah Market area, claiming that these handsets were a threat to national security and their sale and usage was banned by the state government.

Sandeep Agarwal, a computer and mobile handset reseller in Sanjay Place area of the town, claimed that barely a couple of years back, Nokia was an undisputed leader of handset sales in Agra, but the entry of Chinese handsets in the market had boosted the mobile handset market of the town, pushing the sale of grey-market handsets to almost the same number as that of branded ones.

As a result, he said, a lot of handset resellers in Agra were currently stocking large quantities of Chinese handsets. Local technicians had even begun offering repair facilities for inoperable Chinese mobile, creating a parallel grey-market economy revolving around these handsets.

He said that it was true that some cheap mobile handsets did not have the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, which made them untraceable for the police and caused a threat to national security.

Such handsets, he claimed, were already being blocked out by the mobile telephony service providers according to the instructions of the Department of Telecommunications, and resellers had stopped stocking such handsets to avoid blocking their money in handsets about to be rendered useless.

At present, Agarwal said, the handsets being sold by the resellers were high-end Chinese handsets, which did have IMEI numbers making them trackable for the law-enforcement agencies and hence legal to sell and operate.

But, he said, the local police were treating china-made handsets explicitly as an illegal commodity, which was creating a panic among the mobile resellers of Agra, who had invested large sums of money on importing Chinese handsets and were currently under the police scanner for a trade which was absolutely legitimate.