There has been a reduction of 20 percent in the spam calls in the past two months, the officials from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) have said. TRAI had issued directions in August mandating that any entity found to be making promotional voice calls in violation of regulations would face strict consequences, including disconnection of all telecom resources, blacklisting for up to two years, and a ban on new resource allocation during the blacklisting period. Consequent to this direction, Access Providers had taken widespread actions which led to a significant reduction in the complaints registered against the spam calls, officials said.
According to the officials, the number of registered complaints against unregistered senders, as reported by the Access Providers, were 1.89 lakh in August 2024 which were reduced to 1.51 lakh in October 2024 (20% reduction from August 2024). “To enhance message traceability, TRAI has mandated that the trail of all messages from Senders/Principal Entities to recipients must be traceable from 1st November 2024. All Access Providers have since implemented the technical solutions. However, to provide a transition time for technical upgrades, and chain declaration by Principal Entities (PEs) and Telemarketers (TMs), TRAI extended the time upto 30th November 2024,” said an official.
To raise awareness about these measures and action to be taken by PEs and RTMs, webinars were organized with the telecom service providers under the aegis of TRAI. “As a result of these efforts, more than thirteen thousand PEs have already registered their chains with the respective Access Providers and further registration is in progress at a rapid pace. Access Providers have sent many warning notices to all PEs and Registered Telemarketers (RTMs) who have not yet implemented necessary changes. All PEs and TMs are advised to complete the declaration of chains on priority as any message that fails to adhere to the defined telemarketer chain will be rejected,” the official said.
