The stand-off between India’s telecom regulator and the country’s most widely used caller identification app sharpened on Friday, with Truecaller CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala telling Financial Express in an exclusive interview that TRAI’s mandate barring spam labels on designated commercial number series has backfired, creating distrust in the very calls it was meant to legitimise.
“The aim of the designated series (140/1600) was to create a channel that is trusted, and what has happened is they’ve created a channel which is distrusted,” Jhunjhunwala said. “I don’t see how that is pro-consumer. I also don’t see how this is anti-spammer; consumers are suffering because they’re getting spammed, and spammers are happy that it’s whitelisted on Truecaller.”
He said the platform had warned the regulator on several occasions that the mandate “is not reducing spam in any way. It is eroding the trust that you want to build with consumers.”
Trai vs Treucaller: The dispute
At the heart of the confrontation are the 140 and 1600 number series created under TRAI’s Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), finalised in February 2025. The 140 series is reserved for registered telemarketers, while the 1600 series is designated for service and transaction calls by BFSI entities regulated by the RBI, SEBI, IRDAI and PFRDA, and for government-to-citizen communication. In late 2025, TRAI directed caller ID apps to whitelist both series entirely.
Jhunjhunwala said Truecaller had flagged the risk before complying. “We went back to them and said, this is going to cause problems. If you don’t have any gatekeeping using apps like Truecaller, spammers are going to get hold of these numbers because they are whitelisted,” he said. “Spammers are really enjoying themselves with 140 and 1600 numbers.”
The company’s compliance, he said, has been total and remains in force. “No 140 and no 1600 call is ever going to be red on Truecaller. That is what we did as whitelisting,” he said, adding that the numbers carry no labelling of any kind on the app.
In its Friday clarification, the regulator defended the framework, saying customers already have the right to allow or block promotional calls by sector through the DND registry, and that third-party tagging “can mislead a customer who has otherwise allowed receipt of such calls from a sector.”
But TRAI has also approached MeitY seeking authority over caller ID platforms, a move that prompted Jhunjhunwala to go public.
“We are bound by the IT Act; that’s who regulates us. They are seeking powers from MeitY to have the authority to direct us to do anything that they want,” he said. “Here we are, complying with the request, helping consumers, we have 350 million users in India, and on the other side, they are trying to get more powers against us.”
‘Consumers complain of spam calls from 1600’
According to Truecaller’s internal data, around 80 per cent of calls from the 140 and 1600 series go unanswered. Users manually block around 4 lakh calls a day on the 140 series and 1.25 lakh calls a day on the 1600 series, the series reserved specifically for transactional communication such as bank fraud alerts and payment confirmations.
“As adoption is increasing, we are seeing more and more spam reports, growing dramatically every day, people saying, I’m getting spammed from 1600, and Truecaller is not showing me spam for it,” Jhunjhunwala said.
The fallout, he said, is hitting Truecaller’s own credibility with users. “Consumers are saying, what is wrong with Truecaller? Truecaller is not working anymore. I trusted this product for 17 years, and now suddenly they’re saying this is not spam when it’s clearly spam.”
However, they added that the mandate has had no direct effect on Truecaller’s business. “We have not seen a business impact, simply because the volume of calls that 140 and 1600 does is a small amount of the total number of calls that are made. People still trust us for the rest of the calls.”
‘Like mandating Gmail to stop spam-filtering’
Jhunjhunwala argued that community-reported spam identification is a consumer right, not a company algorithm. “It’s not some algorithm that we have invented that says we are going to mark 1600 numbers as spam. If consumers all over India say that this number is spam, we show it as spam to the next person the call goes to,” he said. “Let consumers continue to exercise that right.”
He drew a pointed analogy with email. “It’s like mandating Google to say you cannot spam-filter anymore, all bank emails must go to inbox. But banks do spam. Why can’t they go to the spam folder? Gmail has built an algorithm that is helping consumers. What is wrong in that?”
The restriction, he noted, applies across the ecosystem: “The reason you’re getting spam calls from 1600 is because TRAI is not allowing anyone to mark those numbers as spam. Jio, Airtel, Google, Samsung, Truecaller, Apple, nobody can mark these numbers as spam.”
The Internet and Mobile Association of India has separately opposed TRAI’s proposals, arguing that caller ID apps are governed by the IT Act rather than telecom regulation.
Truecaller says it will share its data with MeitY, as it did with TRAI, ahead of any decision on the regulator’s request.