February 13, 2025e-Paper
The Hindu On Books Books of the week, reviews, excerpts, new titles and features.
Data Point Decoding the headlines with facts, figures, and numbers
First Day First Show News and reviews from the world of cinema and streaming.
Health Matters Ramya Kannan writes to you on getting to good health, and staying there
The View From India Looking at World Affairs from the Indian perspective.
Science For All The weekly newsletter from science writers takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in!
Karnataka Today Your daily dose of news highlights from Karnataka
Today's Cache Your download of the top 5 technology stories of the day.
February 13, 2025e-Paper
Updated – February 13, 2025 01:47 am IST – NEW DELHI
Legitimate business messages will now have further disclosure requirements. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Wednesday (February 12, 2025) notified tighter rules for spam calls and SMS messages over telecom networks. Under the fresh amendment to the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), 2018, telcos are required to accept complaints against spam after up to a week of receiving such calls, act on unregistered telemarketers faster (within five days), and impose lower tolerance thresholds for reported spammers.
Legitimate business messages will now have further disclosure requirements. “Customers will be able to identify the type of commercial message by just looking at its [SMS sender] header as “-P”, “-S”, “-T”, and “-G” will be suffixed to the message header for identification of promotional, service, transactional, and government messages, respectively,” TRAI said in a note accompanying the notification.
Repeated violators will face further action. “For the first violation of the regulatory threshold, outgoing services of all telecom resource[s] of the sender will be barred for 15 days,” TRAI says. “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.”
Financial disincentives of ₹2–10 lakh have also been prescribed for telcos who misreport the spam complaints they receive from users. Recent steps taken by telcos to block spam calls using Artificial Intelligence have now been baked into regulation. “Access providers are mandated to analyse call and SMS patterns based on parameters such as unusually high call volumes, short call durations, and low incoming-to-outgoing call ratios,” TRAI said.
The DND (Do Not Disturb) app, which has not been maintained in a long time, has been updated. The app allows users to report SMS and call spam to their telcos, and TRAI chairperson Anil Kumar Lahoti said that reporting was a crucial element to addressing spam in an interaction with presspersons. 
Published – February 12, 2025 10:18 pm IST
telecommunication service / laws
Copyright© 2025, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD. or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
BACK TO TOP
Terms & conditions  |  Institutional Subscriber
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.

source