Invalid SMS will be prohibited as part of TRAI's pilot experiment, launching this month

Telecom Regulator TRAI is going to start a pilot project this month, under which customers will get complete relief from unwanted SMS (commercial and advertising messages). TRAI has instructed all the telecom companies to provide more effective DND (Do-Not-Disturb) services to the customers. Under this facility, people will get the option to receive only necessary SMS as per their choices. TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti said strict rules to control spam messages and a new investigation process for telemarketers will also be initiated shortly.

Anil Kumar Lahoti said that a digital distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform has been launched, where all the major entities (PEs) such as banks, financial institutions, business organizations, and government agencies along with their telemarketers (TM) have been linked. Registration on DLT is necessary for them. Digital or paper consent of mobile consumers is also required to send messages to them. However, the challenge in this is to bring the paper consent of the customers to DLT, because you cannot completely abandon it.

TRAI said that the DLT platform is based on blockchain technology, where all companies will have to declare the transmission process of sending SMS. This will make it possible to track every message easily. This will make it possible to find out from where the message has been sent and to whom it has been delivered without compromising data security or delaying SMS delivery. Along with this, the validity of every message will be checked with this technology and the messages which are not valid will be blocked before they are delivered.

Currently, if a consumer receives an SMS or call from a particular service provider or seller and the customer complains that it is spam, then the companies argue that they have the consent of this particular customer on paper. This record is only on paper, not in the online system. Therefore, we have created a system where the customer's previous consents come on the DLT platform. After this, people can withdraw the old consent if they want.

At the same time, TRAI has refused to review the newly notified rule in which the telecom service providers have been instructed to provide special tariff vouchers for voice calls and SMS separately. Lahoti said that the use of data by consumers can be incentivized but not compelled. He said that the endeavor of TRAI is also towards the protection of the interests of the people along with the industry.

TRAI is going to bring the authorization framework to stop spam calls this month. It will be implemented in the coming few weeks. After this, the user's number will receive calls only from those telemarketers to whom he has given permission i.e. consent. In August last year, the telecom regulator announced several new rules to curb spam calls and messages. Of these, the new rule about fraudulent calls and messages was brought in October. Once this rule comes into practice, messages containing URLs from those telemarketers who have not been whitelisted will not come on the user's phone.