To deal with evolving methods of misuse of telecom resources and promote a more transparent commercial communication ecosystem for consumers, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has amended the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), 2018 to further strengthen consumer protection against unsolicited commercial communication.
The revised regulations aim to deal with evolving methods of misuse of telecom resource and promote a more transparent commercial communication ecosystem for consumers.
TRAI issued a consultation paper on the ‘Review of the TCCCPR 2018′ on August 28, 2024 to seek stakeholders’ views on key regulatory amendments needed to enhance consumer protection and curb UCC.
The consultation focused on several vital issues, including redefining commercial communication categories, strengthening consumer complaint redressal mechanisms, tightening the threshold norms for action against UCC, bringing in higher accountability of senders and telemarketers, curbing the misuse of 10-digit numbers for telemarketing, implementing stricter measures against unregistered telemarketers (UTMs), etc.
The amendments introduced on February 12, 2025 build upon stakeholder feedback and extensive internal deliberations to reinforce consumer rights and prevent misuse of telecom resources while at the same time aiming that legitimate commercial communication occur through registered entities, based on the preference and consent of the customers, thereby, balancing the interests of consumers with the need for supporting legitimate economic activities in the country.
Telecom operators must now implement robust systems to monitor and analyse communication patterns while ensuring compliance with the new regulations. The mandatory use of specific number series and headers will require telemarketers to align their operations with TRAI’s guidelines.
Ease of Reporting
As per the latest amendments, consumers will now be able to make complaint against spam calls and messages sent by unregistered senders without the need of first registering their preferences for blocking or receiving commercial communications.
To make the complaint process simpler and more effective, it has been mandated that if a complaint made by a customer contains bare minimum essential data, the complaint shall be treated as a valid complaint. Further, a customer can now make a complaint about spam/ UCC within 7 days of receiving spam as compared to earlier 3-day time limit.
The access providers have been mandated to display the options for registering spam/UCC complaints at a prominent and easy to find place in their mobile app and web portal. Time limit for taking action by the access providers against the UCC from unregistered senders has been reduced from 30 days to 5 days.
To ensure prompt action against the senders of UCC, the criterion for taking action against them has been revised and made more stringent. As compared to earlier criterion of ‘having 10 complaints against the sender in last 7 days’ to trigger action, it has been modified to “having 5 complaints against the sender in last 10 days’.
Stringent Measures
Access providers must suspend all telecom resources of a sender found guilty of repeated violations. For the first violation of the regulatory threshold, outgoing services of all telecom resource of the sender will be barred for 15 days. For subsequent violations, all telecom resources of the sender, including PRI/SIP trunks, will be disconnected across all access providers for a period of one year and the sender will be blacklisted.
The amendment restricts senders from using normal 10-digit numbers for telemarketing, ensuring that all commercial communications originate from designated headers or specific number series. While the 140 series will continue to be used for promotional calls, the newly allocated 1600 series is designated for transactional and service calls, with implementation already in progress.
In case of failure of the access providers to implement these regulations, provisions for imposing financial disincentives in graded manner have been introduced. A financial disincentive of Rs 2 lakh for first instance of violation, Rs 5 lakh for second instance of violation and Rs 10 lakh per instance for subsequent instances of violation.
To make the provision more effective, access providers have been mandated to enter into a legally binding agreement with all the registered Senders and Telemarketers wherein their roles and responsibilities as well as the actions that can be taken against them in case of non-compliance, shall be incorporated.
Empowering Customers
Telecom operators must now provide a mandatory option in the promotional messages using which a customer may opt out of receiving such messages, thereby, making preference modification simpler and easier for the consumers.
Message headers will now carry standardised identifiers to help consumers easily distinguish between promotional, service, and transactional messages.
Customers will be able to identify the type of commercial message by just looking at its header as “-P”, “-S”, “-T”, and “-G” will be suffixed to the message header for identification of promotional, service, transactional, and government messages, respectively.
A separate category for messages sent by government has been created so that customers do not miss important government communications beneficial to them.
A sender shall not make a request seeking consent of a customer who has opted out, before ninety (90) days from the date of such opt-out by the customer. However, customer will have the option to opt-in any time.