BlackBerry holding company Research in Motion (RIM) has come forward with details behind its agreed cooperation with the Indian government after threats that BlackBerry services would be switched off due to security issues last month.

In September, India (as well as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia) warned RIM that it would turn off several BlackBerry services such as email and the highly popular BlackBerry Messenger within the country due to concerns over the company’s encrypted data networks.

All data transferred over BlackBerry networks globally are secured via a VPN between the sender and the recipient. As a result, governments are unable to monitor this information for security threats.

RIM has however agreed to cooperate with the Indian government by giving it manual access to its messenger service in real time by the 1st of January. At present, Indian officials are receiving the information in print outs four to five hours later.

According to Reuters, the Indian government is also seeking access to mail sent over the BlackBerry network although RIM has revealed that it does not have the authority to grant this request, adding that this would be the cellular operator’s prerogative.

Overall, RIM has confirmed that it "remains optimistic that a positive outcome can be achieved," but added that it will not fundamentally alter the architecture of its security networks in order to placate concerned governmental bodies.