GUWAHATI: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) recently prohibited commercial communication via standard 10-digit mobile numbers for telemarketing purposes. This decision has been taken to curb unsolicited commercial communications (UCC), combat spam calls, enhance consumer protection, and ensure transparency.
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Stricter regulations under the amended Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), 2018, now state that telemarketers must use designated number series: the ‘140’ series for promotional calls and the newly allocated ‘1600’ series for transactional and service-related calls.
To help consumers, TRAI has also simplified the process of reporting spam messages and calls. Users can now file complaints against unregistered senders without pre-registering their communication preferences. The reporting window has been extended from three to seven days, and telecom operators must resolve complaints within five days, a significant reduction from the earlier 30-day limit.
Additionally, the threshold for penalising telemarketers has also been lowered to five complaints within 10 days.
The new regulations have introduced stricter penalties for repeat offenders. First-time violators will face a 15-day suspension of outgoing telecom services. Persistent offenders risk having all telecom resources disconnected across all service providers for a year, along with blacklisting. Telecom operators failing to enforce these rules will face financial penalties, starting at ₹2 lakh for the first violation and escalating to ₹10 lakh for subsequent offences.
TRAI has further mandated that telecom operators include an ‘opt-out’ option in promotional messages, enabling users to block unwanted marketing content easily. Standardised message headers have also been introduced to help distinguish promotional, service, transactional, and government communications.