The body representing India's booming outsourcing business insisted Saturday that the country was a safe place to do business following a British TV news sting showed alleged call center fraud.

Britain's Channel 4 aired a documentary Thursday purporting to show how the data of thousands of British customers could be stolen and sold by call center employees for as little as US$15.

"Security is a number one priority," said the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) president Kiran Karnik, in a statement.

He cited a recent investigation of call centers in India by Britain's Banking Codes Standards Board which found that "customer data (in India) is subject to the same level of security as in the UK." Karnik's comments came after Britain's privacy watchdog announced Friday it would probe charges by the Channel 4 Dispatches program that made headlines in Britain. It said it was concerned by any breaches of security, particularly if they involved confidential banking details.

The TV program showed people offering to sell credit card numbers, passwords and other information obtained from Indian call centers.

NASSCOM, which represents India's US$24 billion information technology and outsourcing industry, is anxious to safeguard the sector's reputation from any allegations that India is lax on security.

The group said it had written to the British program makers requesting their "immediate cooperation" and to provide details of the allegations "that would have enabled prompt action against the alleged criminals."

But it said they had refused to cooperate.

The software body said "an investigation by the Indian police is already well underway."

"We take any alleged breach of security extremely seriously. The fact there was no suggestion of customers suffering financial loss in Dispatches' report does not diminish the priority we give to all security issues," Karnik said.

New planned legislation to strengthen India's already-tight (data protection) laws would "ensure the globally best cyber environment," he added.

The trade body has trained 1,800 Indian police officers in detecting cyber-crime, a NASSCOM official said.

India's outsourcing industry has been shaken by a series of security breaches.

Last year, police arrested several employees employed in the western city of Pune on accusations of robbing New York bank customers of thousands of dollars by persuading them to reveal their Internet banking passwords.

In June, police accused an employee in the high-tech city of Bangalore of selling customer bank details to fraudsters in Britain who stole money from their accounts.

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