Take measures to curb bulk communications using voice calls: Centre

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.

They also informed about the control of promotion calls whether robotic calls, auto-dialler calls or pre-recorded calls, and migration of all such enterprise business customers on the Distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform for sending bulk communication in compliance with the TRAI regulations.

TRAI has sought proactive action from all the stakeholders, specially access service providers and their delivery telemarketers, to take immediate action.

It includes implementing technical solutions for traceability and to prevent bulk calling by their enterprise customers using 10-digit numbers through PRI/SIP.

In order to tackle the spread of spam calls, the central government last month extended the timeline for feedback submission for draft guidelines by 15 days.

The Department of Consumer Affairs, which is also deliberating on the spam call menace received various suggestions which were under examination.

Meanwhile, the stakeholders urged the government to ensure a level-playing field in regulatory compliance requirements between telecom service providers (TSPs) and other messaging platforms providing similar communication services.

The industry players continue to assist the Department of Telecommunication (DoT), TRAI and the Department of Consumer Affairs in addressing the spam calls and SMS menace.

The issue involves multiple stakeholders -- TSPs, telemarketers, aggregators, principal entities (PEs) like banks, financial institutions and real estate agencies, according to the Cellular Operators' Association of India (COAI).