As message traceability rule kicks in, expect fewer disruptions

It is likely to be business as usual with minimal disruptions in getting commercial SMSes like OTPs from Wednesday, when the telcos are supposed to kick in traceability of such messages and block those not conforming with the new mandate of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai). Telcos must ensure the complete chain of messages is known before such messages reach consumers. In case the traceability is not ensured, the messages will have to be blocked.

Officials told ET that currently the rejection rate is hovering at around 5%, which will also get ironed out in the coming days. “The system is working fine with 95% traffic going unhindered. The remaining 5% will be smooth in coming few days. We are monitoring the situation,” an official said.

The move to ensure traceability is meant to curb spam and know the entire chain of entities involved in sending commercial messages to users.


The Trai had originally set November 1 as the date to implement the mandate, but it was extended by a month to December 1, and then pushed to December 11 after telcos warned of massive disruptions if they started blocking messages that did not allow their origin to be traced. Operators had said most telemarketers and business entities like banks were not technically prepared for the new rules.

On November 30, the regulator revealed that 27,000 principal entities (PEs) had already registered their chains with the respective telcos and further registration was in progress at a rapid pace. The regulator is yet to share the updated number.

In India, 1.5-1.7 billion commercial messages are sent every day as per industry data, underscoring the extent of the disruption if messages are blocked or undelivered. The mandate around traceability is among the various measures taken by Trai to curb the rampant spam and pesky communications. Before this, the regulator had asked the telcos to whitelist messages containing URLs, OTT links etc to check online scam.

Whitelisting means entities sending commercial messages must provide all information related to URLs, OTT links etc. to telcos, who will then feed the information to their blockchain-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform. If the information matches, the message is passed, otherwise, it is blocked. The whitelisting mechanism has been working fine for the last over two months.

The regulator has been asking for the implementation of the whitelisting and traceability mandate from last year. The reason to ensure traceability was because there were many instances of misuse of headers and templates of commercial messages.

In the absence of traceability, the entire chain can't be known. As per the mandate of Trai, only registered principal entities can send promotional and marketing messages to mobile consumers.

To deter misuse of headers and content, Trai directed immediate suspension of traffic from all the headers and content templates of that sender for their verification. It added that revocation of traffic from the sender shall be done only after legal action is taken by the sender against such misuse.