BANGALORE: The alarm bells are ringing, but India's call centres and state governments seem still sluggish in enacting data protection laws to protect customer confidentiality.

Except for Andhra Pradesh, which is seeking opinion for a data protection bill, other states as well as the centre appear to be still seeking inputs from industry for legislation that could provide a more secure environment to attract business for India's sunrise industry.

Last month's judgement by a New Delhi court convicting a young call centre employee in what was India's first cyber crime conviction "is a wakeup call as far as data protection by call centres is concerned", Pavan Duggal, a noted Supreme Court lawyer, told IANS.

The case involved a call centre employee acquiring a Sony colour television and a cordless headphone using the credit number of an American national, a client of the call centre's customer.

It was only after the client denied making the purchase did the television company realise it was the victim of cyber crime. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) tracked down the culprit and recovered the gadgets. The culprit admitted his crime.

The interesting aspect of this case was that it was possible to convict Arif Azim under the more-than-a-century-old Indian Penal Code (IPC). That was mainly because he confessed his crime.

Duggal said other cases might not be as easy as Azim's. Officially, no call centre has reported any crime so far, but indications are that there could be quite a few where confidentiality has been compromised.

"The existing laws of the country, namely the IPC and the IT Act, are not at all adequate to tackle data protection as this issue has not been touched specifically in these," Duggal said.

"If India does not quickly come up with sound legislation and legal framework on data protection, the time is not far when we, as a nation, start losing business from other countries. Further, call centres in India need to come out of the complacency that their data is not being compromised."

An official of Karnataka's IT department substantiated Duggal's point to some extent.

"We have sought the opinion of the industry before formulating the draft legislation, but for some reason they haven't shown the same enthusiasm as in other matters," the official said.

Call centre industry sources said there are enough and more security measures that the companies and their customers take to ensure that all norms of confidentiality are adhered to.

"The U.K. data protection act as well as U.S. legislation is strictly adhered to in the industry. Momentum on this will pick up now because Indian call centres are getting more and more financial services contracts," said a senior official of a call centre who did not want to be identified.

"Nasscom (National Association of Software and Service Companies) is working on this for central legislation," said another industry official.