TRAI urges telcos to take immediate action to curb pesky calls

Amid rise in the consumer complaints about pesky calls, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has urged both private and public telecom operators to take effective and stringent measures to curb unsolicited and bulk communications using voice calls.

The Authority, on August 6, held a meeting with the service providers and their telemarketers and sought proactive action from all the stakeholders. The immediate action sought includes implementing technical solutions for traceability and preventing bulk calling by enterprise customers using 10-digit numbers.

Further deliberating the action on spammers, the meeting saw discussions on the instances of misuse of headers and content templates without the knowledge of entities. It talked about the steps taken by access service providers and delivery telemarketers to identify and trace the entities responsible for sending such messages and to take corrective measures to prevent such cases.

There were also discussions on the control of promo calls whether robotic calls/auto-dialler calls/pre-recorded calls, and migration of all such enterprise business customers on DLT platform for sending bulk communication in compliance with TRAI regulations. Read more: TRAI hosts meeting of regulators to combat spam calls, messages

Over the past few weeks, TRAI has held consultations with industry regulators including RBI, SEBI, government departments including the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Consumer Affairs, and DoT to address the issue of pesky communications and online financial fraud.

It is to be noted that under section 2 (28) and 2(47) of Consumer Protection Act, 2019 respectively, unwarranted or unsolicited commercial communication is misleading and unfair trade practice.

As reported earlier, the Department of Consumer Affairs is working to bring out relevant guidelines in a couple of months. These will put accountability on telemarketers and their principal entities such as banks, real estate companies or any other consumer-facing business. while sending promotional or transactional messages or making such calls for customer conversion.

Read more: Unwanted calls no more! Telemarketing and fraudulent calls to incur criminal liability soon

These proposed guidelines will define what all would come under such fraudulent calls and the focus will be on fixing accountability and ensuring all promotional and transactional communications happen only through the authorised channels. Additionally, the norms will ensure to prohibit the communication in violation of the regulator-prescribed numbers series.

In February 2024, the Consumer Affairs Ministry of India formed a committee to draft guidelines to address unsolicited commercial calls. The committee then advised telemarketers from various sectors to prefix their phone numbers with the 140 number series so that consumers can identify the caller. The committee also emphasised that telemarketers should comply with the enabling provisions.