Minister Prasad told parliament that six proposals have been received for 5G technology trials, including from Huawei. He did not name the others, but firms such as Sweden's Ericsson Finland's Nokia and South Korea's Samsung Electronics are expected to participate.
A high-level group of officials, led by the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Indian government K Vijay Raghavan and including representatives from the departments of telecoms, information technology and the intelligence services, has been looking into whether to open the 5G trials to Huawei.
The committee has found no evidence to suggest Huawei has used "back-door" programmes or malware to collect data in its current operations in India, the first source and another official in the federal telecoms ministry said.
The interior ministry, which is responsible for the security of the infrastructure, had issued no directive to curtail Huawei's entry, the telecoms official said.
"We can't simply reject them just because they are Chinese," said the official.
One option that a tech expert at the government's National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) has suggested is to ensure the hardware and software for the proposed fifth-generation network are not both sourced from Huawei.
The government should get wireless carriers who will be rolling out 5G services to use Indian-made software to drive equipment supplied by gearmakers such as Huawei, NSAB expert V.Kamakoti said in a recent internal presentation reviewed by Reuters.
