RIM wants two years to meet Indian government's demands

RIM has asked the Indian authorities for 18 to 24 months to provide a solution for the interception of emails sent on its enterprise servers, but wants the government to ensure that its services are not banned during this period, according to reports.

Reports on the Indian site Economic Times claim that the demands were made during a meeting between RIM and the Department of Telecommunications in which it promised to provide access to its data within this time.

However, the Department of Telecommunications and India's interior ministry were said to be unimpressed by this, and reiterated their desire for the firm to make sure that its technology for auto interception of BlackBerry Messenger be completed before 31 January.

RIM had no comment to make on the story.

However, the BlackBerry maker said in statement issued last week that it is not facing any deadline to provide access to its data, claiming that this deadline had been removed by the government of India and that it would not provide access to any data.

The company claimed that it is "false and technologically infeasible" that it is enabling access to data transmitted through BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

The lack of clarity still leaves thousands of BlackBerry customers in India waiting to see whether services are banned if RIM fails to address the issue before the deadline.

RIM spent a good part of 2010 dealing with the issue across the world, which is just one example of the increasing pressure being put on many technology firms by the governments of emerging and non-western nations. China's threat to block Skype is perhaps the most recent example.

The Indian government has also said that it may demand information from Skype and Google as part of its continuing efforts to crack down on terrorism.