The government has warned access service providers and their delivery telemarketers to come forward and take effective measures to curb bulk communications and spam using voice calls.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) held a meeting with the industry stakeholders in the national capital to discuss action on spammers, amid growing consumer complaints about unsolicited commercial calls.
According to the government, the deliberations were on instances of misuse of headers and content templates without the knowledge of entities.
The stakeholders also discussed steps taken by access service providers and delivery telemarketers to identify and trace the entities responsible for sending such messages and to take corrective measures to prevent such cases.
Additionally, they provided information regarding the management of promotional calls, including those made by robotic, auto-dialer, or pre-recorded calls, as well as the migration of all of these enterprise business clients to the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform for bulk communication in accordance with TRAI requirements.
All parties involved, particularly access service providers and their delivery telemarketers, have been urged by TRAI to act pro-actively and swiftly.
It entails putting in place technological solutions for traceability and to stop their enterprise clients from using PRI/SIP to dial 10-digit numbers in bulk.
The central government last month extended the deadline for comment submission on the draft rules by 15 days in an effort to combat the proliferation of spam calls.
The Department of Consumer Affairs received a number of proposals that were investigated while it also deliberated about the spam call problem.
A equal playing field in terms of regulatory compliance requirements between telecom service providers (TSPs) and alternative messaging platforms offering comparable communication services was demanded by the stakeholders from the government.
The industry participants are still helping the Department of Consumer Affairs, TRAI, and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) combat the problem of spam calls and SMS messages.
According to the Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI), the problem involves a number of parties, including TSPs, telemarketers, aggregators, and primary entities (PEs) like banks, financial institutions, and real estate companies.
