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.