Joint Committee of Regulators meets; apprised about Trai's recent directions on curbing telemarketing messages

A meeting of the Joint Committee of Regulators (JCOR) was held under the chairmanship of Trai Chief PD Vaghela, and the forum was apprised of the telecom regulator's recent directions to curb pesky telemarketing messages. JCOR, which is an initiative of Trai, consists of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Securities and Exchanges Board of India (Sebi) and Ministry of Consumer Affairs (MoCA) with special invitees from Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to frame joint action plan to curb spam and frauds using telecom resources.

A meeting of the Joint Committee of Regulators was held in New Delhi under the chairmanship of the Trai chief, according to a release by the telecom regulator.

The Trai chairman asserted that Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC) is a major source of inconvenience to the public and is also being used to carry out financial frauds, the release said.


"JCOR was updated about Trai's recent directions to curb misuse of Headers and Content Templates and to curb unauthorised activities using telecom resources under Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulation, 2018 (TCCCPR-2018)," it added.

It was agreed that entities working under respective regulators/departments will be sensitised to implement the directions in a time-bound manner.

"The formulation of a framework for sharing of UCC data detected by telecom service providers on DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) platform, strict action on PEs and RTMs for non-compliance of Regulation, measures to prevent misuse of the SIM Box, the pan-India roll-out of Central Equipment Identity Register (CEIR) to stop misuse of mobile handsets, use of AI/ML based anti-phishing system were some of the issues discussed in the meeting," the release said.

Implementation of 'RegTech solution' on the DLT platform for promotional voice calls and implementation of digital consent acquisition were also discussed, it added.