Speaking to the media Swaraj said that these services, operated under various acronyms such as Funline, Girls Call, Boys Call, Dateline and Party Line were being used to host obnoxious and sexually explicit material and unacceptable language, amounting to cultural invasion of the country.

Swaraj further said that offering of such calls had brought a number of complaints. In many cases, the victims of these calls were children calling or customers whose line were misused where they had to bear the burden of huge bills, which are to be paid in foreign exchange, she added.

VSNL has recently restricted more than one hundred such party line call centres. These centres operated out of countries including the US, Hongkong and Australia.

The communications minister stated that VSNL had been keeping a special watch on long duration calls lasting an hour or more. Most such calls were invariably identified to be fraudulent calls or party line calls for which the country had to dish out foreign currency.

VSNL will continue to monitor and restrict access to pornographic calls by opening a special account misuse on the internet for users to report on such calling numbers, or, other fraudulent practices to the VSNL authorities. Complete anonymity will be maintained of the senders of such messages, Swaraj added.

Under provisions of the license granted to VSNL, the government can ask for blocking of calls to undesirable numbers. VSNL's solicitors were consulted before taking the decision to block pornographic calls as obscene, fraudulent and are a drain on foreign exchange resources, Swaraj added.