The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has tightened its anti-spam framework by bringing AI-based detection of suspected spam and automated Application-to-Person calls under its regulations, while introducing an appeal mechanism for consumers.
Under the amended regulations announced on Friday, telecom service providers will identify numbers that have a high probability of being used to send unsolicited commercial communications and share that information with other providers. The measure is intended to help operators act against suspected spam across networks rather than treating complaints as isolated incidents.
If five or more numbers associated with a sender are flagged within 10 days, the telecom providers will begin further investigation and graded enforcement action. The possible measures include KYC re-verification, physical verification, barring outgoing services and disconnection in cases of repeated violations.
TRAI has also formally defined Application-to-Person, or A2P, calls as calls initiated by an application, software system or automated platform without direct human dialling. The definition covers autodialling, robocalls and calls using pre-recorded or artificial voice technologies.
Entities that use A2P calls will be required to pre-declare their use and the numbers involved to their telecom service provider. Calls made without such a declaration will be treated as unsolicited commercial communications, according to the amended framework. This places a new compliance obligation on organisations that use automated calling systems to contact customers at scale.
The amendments introduce a termination charge of up to 5 paise per minute for A2P calls. TRAI said the charge will not apply to A2P calls made through numbering series designated by the authority for regulated commercial calls or to calls authorised by the authority.
The regulator has also strengthened complaint-based action and safeguards against the misuse of headers and content templates. Headers and templates are used to identify and structure commercial communications, making their misuse a potential source of misleading or unwanted messages for subscribers.
The new rules also restrict call-management applications from blanket blocking, filtering or spam-tagging calls made from designated 140xx, 1600xx and 1601xx number series. These numbering series are used for regulated commercial and service-related communications, and the restriction is intended to prevent authorised calls from being automatically categorised as spam.
For mobile users, the framework links complaints, network-level data sharing and progressive enforcement more closely than before. For telecom providers and businesses using automated calls, it establishes requirements around detection, declaration, verification and the financial treatment of automated traffic. TRAI’s amended regulations will now guide action against suspected spam and unauthorised A2P calling under the strengthened framework.
