At a time when the government is looking at ways to curb the menace of spam calls, nine in 10 subscribers complain of getting pesky or unwanted calls for brand promotions or sales despite registering on the Do Not Disturb (DND) service by their respective operators.

A survey by community social media platform LocalCircles shows that the DND service is ineffective in the sense that the subscribers receive unwanted calls from personal mobile numbers and not landline numbers or commercial numbers belonging to a particular brand, resulting in by-passing of the entire DND system.

Currently, brands are bound to provide undertakings to the telecom service providers if they are involved in sending commercial communication, but an individual caller doesn’t have to. In order to register phone numbers on DND list, the subscribers can visit their operator’s website or call them to avoid getting unsolicited commercial communication.

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“Unless stringent actions are taken, the menace of pesky calls is unlikely to subside.The system should work in a way that after a certain number of unique subscriber complaints are received the number is blacklisted for outbound calls for a period leading to permanent blacklisting, the survey report said. The survey covered over 56,000 people located in over 342 districts of the country.

Some people surveyed favoured reporting pesky calls against the linked Aadhaar number such that whenever any caller attempts to procure another mobile number they are asked for additional declarations, security deposit including outright rejection of request for a period of time, the report said, adding that 66% of the 11,157 subscribers surveyed, get three or more pesky calls in a day.

Financial services and real estate sectors top the list of sending unwanted calls to people. According to the survey, 78% of the 15,186 subscribers complained of getting calls for financial services and real estate sales, followed by calls for job offers/earnings.

Spam calling from financial services can be linked to another finding on data breaches by LocalCircles which suggested that six in 10 people have reported personal data breach by their loan service providers, while 4 four in 10 people have pointed fingers towards insurance providers or banks.

“Citizens employed in the financial services, real estate and other service industries shared insights about those in sales and marketing in their organisations hiring 3rd party agencies for lead generation. As per the information shared, these contracted agencies have staff who use their personal mobile numbers from their offices or home to make such calls,” LocalCircles said.

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Recently, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) had started the consultation to make it mandatory for service providers to flash caller’s name on the phone screen when users receive calls through implementation of Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) feature. However, the telecom operators opposed Trai’s proposal, citing reasons like technical difficulties, lack of handset support, and privacy issues.

Trai is also expected to meet the telecom operators on February 17 to discuss the quality of services (QoS), review the current quality standards, QoS for 5G services, and unsolicited commercial communication.