Centre puts guidelines for curbing pesky call menace in public domain; invites comments

The Centre has classified pesky calls and other modes of unsolicited commercial communication as unfair trade practice in its newly released guidelines which seek to check the menace of such communication.

The guidelines, which were released on Thursday, will put accountability on telemarketers and their principal entities — such as banks, real estate companies or any other consumer-facing business — while sending promotional or transactional messages or making such calls for customer conversion.

“If a bank engages either directly or indirectly, through an intermediary to make calls to a database of consumers to sell/inform about its various services….the initiator of the call (i.e the intermediary) along with the bank will be considered to be in violation of these guidelines,” the guidelines state.


The proposed guidelines define what comprises a pesky or fraudulent call and list the types of communication to be deemed unsolicited or unwarranted.

The focus of the guidelines is on fixing accountability and ensuring all promotional and transactional communications happen only through the authorised channel

The norms also propose to prohibit communication in violation of the regulator-prescribed number series.

According to estimates, India ranks among the largest markets for SMS phishing, amid a growing mobile user base and low phone tariffs.

Some industry estimates say one of every 12 people is vulnerable every month to phishing. More than 120-150 million phishing messages are sent every month, with 60-75 million unique citizens vulnerable to attacks. Roughly 300,000 people get scammed, but only 35,000-45,000 report these incidents.

The Department of Consumer Affairs officials has put the guidelines in public domain after discussions with the officials of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), as well as executives from Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea, Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) and industry association COAI.

The Department of Consumer Affairs in February constituted a committee to draft guidelines on the issue of unwarranted and unsolicited commercial communication. The panel discussed the first draft last month.

Operators and telemarketers are already governed as per the current regulations concerning pesky communications by DoT and Trai. In addition to that, the new guidelines will look into the aspects such as the legal arrangement between telemarketers and operators with principal entities like banks.

Seeking to put a stop to promotional messages from normal 10-digit mobile numbers, the regulator in 2021 came out with a blockchain-based distributed ledger technologies (DLT) platform for enterprises and telemarketers. It told telcos to enable transmission of promotional messages only through this channel after proper KYC process. Enterprises and telemarketers need to obtain a header and register message templates, and they can send messages only in conformance with these.

Preceding that was the do not disturb (DND) system started by Trai, where a user had to request to be included in such a registry.

However, despite all these initiatives, people get numerous and daily spam or promotional messages from unregistered telemarketers. Such messages mainly come from the financial services and real estate sector.