The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) convened with the Joint Committee of Regulators (JCoR) in a high-level meeting aimed at addressing critical issues in India’s digital infrastructure and consumer protection landscape. The discussions, held on April 25, 2025, focused on aligning regulations across multiple sectors and ensuring the country’s digital ecosystem continues to evolve in a coordinated and consumer-friendly manner.
Held at TRAI’s headquarters in New Delhi, the meeting deliberated issues including dealing with unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) / spam and fraudulent communications.
Members of the JCoR, including representatives from RBI, IRDAl, PFRDA, SEBI, MoCA, and MeitY, participated in the meeting. Additionally, DoT, and MHA representatives attended the meeting as special invitees.
JCoR, an initiative of TRAI, was established to foster collaborative efforts among sectoral regulators from the
telecommunication, IT, Consumer Affairs, and financial and insurance sectors to deliberate cross-sectoral regulatory issues in the digital world and work collaboratively on adopting appropriate regulatory measures. Members of the committee have since leveraged this platform to reinforce their regulatory framework and ensure its effective implementation. The JCoR has provided a collaborative forum to address the issue of UCC and regulatory challenges in the digital era and enhance regulatory frameworks to control UCC through collective effort.
In his opening address, TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti highlighted the critical need for a collaborative approach to combat spam messages arid calls creating inconvenience and defrauding the citizens, especially, the senior citizens, the progress made by JCOR in this regard and the challenges ahead.
Key points discussed:
(i) Modalities for implementation of 1600 series numbers, allocated specially for making transactional and service voice calls by the entities belonging to the government and financial sector, were discussed. The committee members agreed to take up the issue with entities within their jurisdiction for expediting its implementation in a time bound manner and regular monitoring.
The CoAT also made a presentation before the committee regarding various solutions that can offer an entity one 1600 series number CLI to be presented to the recipients across all the TSPs and LSAs in the country.
(ii) Modalities for onboarding of senders of commercial communication onDigital Consent Acquisition (DCA) platform were deliberated. JCoR members agreed to engage with the senders/Principal Entities (PEs) within
their jurisdiction to onboard them on DCA.
(iii) During the deliberations, measures to counter fraudulent communication and the problem of Digital Arrest scams were also discussed. In this regard, measures such as deletion of unused message headers and content templates to avoid their misuse by spammers, prompt action on fraudulent SMS headers, blocking of the Mobile Numbers/IMEl utilized in sending fraudulent messages etc. were discussed. The members agreed to work further on modalities for implementation of the same.
(iv) The issue of spam and scam through OTT and RCS communication platforms were discussed. MeitY will engage with the stakeholders in this regard to take measures analogues to those for conventional telecommunication.
The JCOR members agreed to further strengthen the collaborative efforts to address these issues collectively so as to increase cross sectoral collaboration and also protect consumers from the harms of spam and fraud while ensuring a more secure and efficient telecom commercial communication ecosystem.