Trai mandates AI-based spam detection, imposes charge on robocalls to curb unsolicited calls

New Delhi: Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Friday strengthened its framework to curb unsolicited commercial communication, mandating telecom operators to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect suspected spam calls and introducing a termination charge on automated calls.

Trai has also introduced a consumer appeals mechanism.

The regulator has introduced a termination charge of ₹0.05 per minute for application-to-person (A2P) calls or robocalls, which are used to make bulk calls to users, even as regular commercial calls will remain exempt from these charges.


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Trai has mandated entities using A2P calls to pre-declare such use with telecom service providers along with the numbers to be used for A2P. Failure in doing so will result in the robocalls to be treated as spam. ET was the first to report on this in its September 14 edition.

Under the third amendment to the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018 (TCCCPR, 2018), telecom operators will have to mandatorily deploy AI/ML systems to detect suspected spam calls and share the intelligence with other operators.

If five or more numbers associated with a sender are flagged within 10 days, telcos must initiate graded actions including re-verification of KYC, physical verification, outgoing service barring, and telecom disconnection in cases of repeated violations.

Telcos though are prohibited from flagging calls originating from 1600 and 140 number series as spam to ensure regulated commercial calls are not missed by users. Trai has also barred call management apps (CMA) from blanket blocking, filtering, and spam-tagging calls originating from such numbers.

"Such tagging, without the safeguards built into the regulatory mechanism, risk mislabelling genuine commercial communications and government communications as spam, which are otherwise important to customers," the regulator said in a statement.