NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has ordered a fourfold increase in the users of secure RAX telephone sets, asking senior bureaucrats up to the director level to be given these secure lines for communication so that all government business is safe from interception by intelligence agencies of foreign countries.PM’s Principal Secretary Nripendra Mishra wrote to the home ministry and telecom department on July 9, asking for the number of RAX users to be expanded to 5,000 officials.Home secretary Anil Goswami in a letter on July 17 agreed to the idea and the Department of Telecom approved the proposal on September 3, as per a letter trail accessed by ET.So far, only about 1,300 officials up to the joint secretary level have secure RAX lines. As per the new proposal, all officials till the director level will be given these lines and a RAX phone will also be provided at the residence of each official. “Many a time, in an emergency, officers are contacted at home too. The confidentiality of that conversation also cannot be compromised,” a senior government official said.The 5,000 users will be given new RAX phones for internal communication which can be operated only after fingerprint identification. A live picture of the caller is also visible on the phone-set of the officer receiving the secure call, thereby eliminating chances of impersonation.The special secured handset enables classified communication to be encrypted at the handset stage itself, thus making a communication secure from tapping. The 1,300-odd officials having RAX lines so far did get these new phones last year but they are not operational and officials continue to use their old and far less secure handsets for confidential communication.The new phones have been developed by the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) and MTNL will now make all these phones operational for 5000 users.Government officials will be soon instructed to speak strictly through RAX lines to each other for maintaining confidentiality of communication.BJP government has been critical of the US snooping attempts and foreign minister Sushma Swaraj had ticked off US Secretary of State John Kerry on this issue when he had came visiting in July.