A year after the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) tightened guidelines to curb unwanted marketing calls and messages, the situation of such calls has shown a little improvement in the country.
According to a survey by community social media platform LocalCircles, 60% of mobile subscribers are still getting three or more spam calls on an average every day. Most unwanted calls are related to financial services and real estate involving brands.
The survey said 54% of respondents are receiving pesky calls from companies such as Bajaj Finance, HDFC Bank, HDFC Life Insurance, IDFC First Bank, among others. Around 22% of respondents are getting calls from companies selling real estate.
The survey shows that 40% mobile subscribers have identified Bajaj Finance as the top offender, followed by 27%, pointing at HDFC group as the second biggest pesky caller. “The need of the hour is to enable a system where pesky callers are blacklisted at the identity/Aadhar level, so they have the risk of not getting a new SIM,” LocalCircles said.
It said the brands on whose behalf the contracted callers are calling also need to be held accountable by the department of consumer affairs so brands institute the right consumer outreach practices both with employees as well as the third party contractors.
The survey received over 60,000 responses from citizens located in 378 districts of India. Around 6% of respondents, however, indicated that they have been receiving no spam calls.
In February last year, Trai had asked the telcos to reverify all registered headers and message templates on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform and block all unverified headers and message templates within 30 and 60 days, respectively. Post that, the regulator issued several follow-up guidelines last year to curb pesky calls, including implementation of an AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) system to detect unsolicited communication.
Trai had also warned Principal Entities (PEs) like banks, other financial institutions, insurance companies, trading companies and businesses, etc., to get their content templates registered.
Comparing the survey results from February 2023 to those of February 2024, LocalCircles said in some categories there has been an increase as in the case of selling real estate; which has risen from 18% in February 2023 to 22% now.
On the other hand, calls related to job/ earnings offering have seen a dip from 10% of unwanted calls to 4% and in the case of those selling financial services, the calls have slipped from 60% of unwanted calls to 54%.
Last week, the department of consumer affairs also constituted a committee comprising members of different regulatory authorities, telemarketing companies and cellular industry to draft the guidelines to address the issue of pesky calls.
The key provisions in the new Telecom Act also aim to protect telecom users, by making impersonation and fraudulent SIM acquisition using someone else’s identity proof, punishable by imprisonment for up to three years and a fine of up to `5 million. Last year, the government had blocked 65 telecom setups that were enabling fraudulent calls with fake Indian numbers.