The Indian government is unlikely to offer a backdoor entry to Chinese gear makers Huawei and ZTE, who have proposed manufacturing gear in India in partnership with Indian companies, according to media reports.

It was earlier reported that ZTE teamed up with an Indian firm, Celkon Resolute, to manufacture routers at Tirupati in South India. ZTE is believed to have reached out to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) about producing Wi-Fi 6 routers but the government is unlikely to accept this arrangement.

A senior government official is reported to have said that deployment of "non-trusted" gear will not be allowed in Indian networks. Chinese vendors are yet to receive "trusted source" certification from the National Cyber Security Coordinator (NCSC). The government has made it mandatory for service providers to only work with vendors who have obtained this certification.

Earlier this year, DoT asked telecom operators, specifically Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel, to thoroughly evaluate the extent of gear from "non-trusted" sources being used in their networks. It is believed that this assessment will help DoT decide whether to apply a rip-and-replace approach to the legacy non-trusted equipment. So far, the telcos have resisted sharing this information.

While the government didn't officially ban Chinese vendors from operating in India after the skirmishes between Chinese and Indian armies on the Indo-Chinese border in 2020, it made it difficult for them to operate in the country.

Surprisingly, this anti-China stance is not so apparent in other sectors. For example, the Indian government recently approved a joint venture between China's Huaqin Technology and Bhagwati Products to set up a unit in India. Huaqin is one of the world's largest original design manufacturers (ODMs) and will acquire a minority stake in the venture.