I'd heard of stories selectively leaked to the media. But I never thought I'd be gifted with one.

There are roughly thirty thousand biometric passports in India today. The President, the Prime Minister, the Congress chief and senior diplomats are all proud owners. You'll get one too - if you're applying for a new passport. Or if your dad is renewing his old one.

A normal passport can be forged. But biometric passports have an electronic chip inside, which stores everything your normal passport does. But it also contains your fingerprints and iris patterns. Since that stuff can't be duplicated, a biometric passport is supposed to be extra safe. Extra secure.

The e-mail I got broke that bubble. Biometric passports can be hacked and forged, it suggested. A Pakistani terrorist with a forged Indian diplomat's passport could walk through airport counters across the world with minimum checks. Bomb targets at will. And point the needle of suspicion at India. A disaster waiting to happen.

Over coffee, the gentlemen behind that e-mail took me through the details. Indian biometric passports use chips from a multinational company that supplies similar chips to electronic passport projects in a number of countries, including the US.

This February, Christopher Tarnovsky, an American hacker, who once worked for America's Homeland Security department, broke into one of those chips. It took him six months, tons of money and a secure, high-tech laboratory to do it. He then posted a video on YouTube.

Here's what my patrons told me. A chip once considered impregnable can now be hacked. In a neighborhood as troubled as ours, how long would it be before a terrorist group manages to pull it off?

If that was the hook, here was the sinker. The Indian passport office, they claimed, was ignoring the hacking reports. A tender for fresh chips currently underway, had not outlawed the company in question. By the time our babus woke up, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable passports would be floating around, waiting to be forged.

After a week of phone calls, e-mails, web searches and lots of hand wringing, here's what I've got to disprove those claims. This is data gleaned from industry associations, rival companies, technical experts and senior editors from technology magazines.

First - Christopher Tarnovsky, the American hacker. He's what's called a Black Hat Hacker. He's paid by companies to wreck and poke holes in their systems.

Sort of like employing the world's best lock picker, to test your locks. If he breaks through, you find a way to remove that particular weakness. If he doesn't, you know that no one else can.

After attacking the chip in question, Tarnovsky called it a ticking time bomb. Examining it under an electron microscope showed him a thick physical mesh on top of the chip, designed to ward off attackers.

One wrong move he said, and the software on the chip was primed to make it self destruct, destroying all the data on it. This was strictly for someone very, very competent.

Probably why the chip in question has a high security rating. There is an organization called Common Criteria (CC). Think of it as an international ISI mark for computer chips. Their website says the chip we're worried about has a rating of 5+. The highest rating on their scale is 7.

Coming back to India. The National Informatics Corporation (NIC) is one of the core organisations responsible for conceptualising, designing and bringing our biometric passports to market.

Senior technical directors asked me this. Why would you spend thousands of dollars and months of precious time trying to break into a chip, when all the info on it, is also freely available on the paper passport?

The only data not on paper - is your unique biometric information. To duplicate that, a hacker would you'd need to clone you. Possible. But it'll take millions of more dollars. And years more of time.

To hack the chip, you'd have to physically remove it from the passport. And damage it permanently. There's no way to set it right again. The damaged passport would then set off alarms at every counter it's presented at.

Supposing our hacker terrorists didn't want to re-use a passport, but duplicate it? They'd run into an extra layer of security.

Information on the chip is signed digitally, with a two-piece code. One part of that code is called the Government's public key. This is what authorises airport immigration officials to read the data on the chip. This, can possibly be copied by a hacker, who's bypassed the chip's tough physical and software defenses.

The other part is called the Government's Private Key. This authorises a person to add data to the chip. The Private Key is a random piece of software code generated by Indian supercomputers. It's stored on servers disconnected from the outside world. In a vault made of steel one inch thick. Rather hard to break into.

Data written on a biometric chip, WITHOUT the private key, would show up as fake at immigration counters.

To cross check this info, I spoke to other industry experts. Most of them agree with the above data. One of them, told me I was on a wild goose chase. There are two prominent international companies fighting, for the right to supply chips for India's biometric passports, he said. And this was a merely a ploy by one to throw the other off track.

Intrigued, I checked online for details on the competing company. And Google threw up a photograph of its chief sales officer. It was one of the gentlemen who'd briefed me over coffee.

These folks had claimed they were merely concerned Indian citizens. A friend of theirs, deeply involved with the passport project aired his fears about its vulnerability. And they, as individuals well networked with the media, took it upon themselves to set things right.

Let's ignore for a moment, their deception. With the facts above, I'd be prepared to let this rest as a false lead. But then, how do I explain the unsolicited email from a Supreme Court advocate. With "friendly advice" about not maligning a certain companies' name. Heck, that company's communication head himself didn't feel the need to threaten me when I spoke to him - so who exactly is this uninvited guest?

Let's check this again. To forge an electronic passport, a hacker would:

i) Need to buy a highly restricted computer chip from industry insiders,

ii) Steal an Indian passport, knowing full well it might raise red flags in the system,

iii) Get someone very highly trained, with an exotic lab, to break into the passport's chip,

iv) Get a government insider to break into a secure vault and steal the government's private authorization key,

v) Write new data onto the other chip they'd bought before,

vi) Insert that chip seamlessly into a new forged passport, without triggering alarms.

Each of these operations is in itself a challenge, with the need for very specialised skills. It would need separate teams of highly motivated, rich, very intelligent individuals collaborating together. It seems like too much bloody effort, too impossible a stunt to pull off.

But wouldn't you say the same thing about the preparations behind the 9/11 attack? So what do you think? What should we do?

P.S: The firm whose chip is in question says they'll have a NEW product ready by the end of this year. This one would have an extra layer of security - to beat the weakness Christopher Tarnovsky pointed out. It wouldn't let any info flow out of it without scrambling it digitally.

So will the thirty thousand chips already in our passports, be replaced with this new, more secure product? After all, our biometric project is still an early work in progress. And what's thirty thousand chips compared to the millions of passports that will be rolled in India. The firm wouldn't comment.