India’s mobile sector is under scrutiny today following analyst reports that suggest the trend of users owning multiple SIMs is distorting the true state of the market. A report in the Financial Times, citing unidentified analysts, claims that the number of Indian mobile phone users could actually be up to 40 percent lower than the official numbers suggest. Meanwhile Wireless Intelligence analyst Joss Gillet, in a new blog post today, notes that “it is well-known that users tend to have more than one SIM card (my gut feeling would be an average of four per user) that they select depending on the territory they travel to or, more commonly, the latest cheapest prepaid deal on offer (85% of the user base in India is on prepaid tariffs).” Gillet adds that, “If tomorrow the regulator introduced a new regulation – like in Vietnam – limiting the number of SIM cards per user and asking all operators to remove inactive SIM cards from their subscriber base to report active subscribers, we would see operators’ figures shrink dramatically and market shares would be redistributed, to some extent, reflecting a very different picture.” Read the full blog post here.

According to Wireless Intelligence, India is the second largest mobile market in the world and recently reached 525 million connections which makes it twice the size of the USA and as big as Western Europe. The analyst firm believes there’s a very high probability that in just over five years it might become the world’s largest mobile market.