India ranks as the fifth most spammed country in the world, behind Indonesia, Chile, Vietnam and Brazil, according to a study by Truecaller in May. With spam intensity at 66% India is fifth worst-affected market globally and the problem is only “going to get worse”, according to Truecaller CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala.
Not just a ‘today’ problem
In late 2025, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) required promotional telemarketing calls to use 140-series numbers and mandated phased adoption of 1600-series numbers for BFSI service and transactional calls. The stated goal was to help consumers separate legitimate business calls from spam.
“This might sound good on paper, but the problem started when TRAI also mandated Truecaller to NOT show any community-reported spam information, thereby restricting Truecaller to never show any 140 and 1600 numbers as spam. This seemed very strange from our point of view,” Jhunjhunwala posted on LinkedIn.
The CEO said Truecaller had warned TRAI what would follow and that it did. With no way to verify 140 and 1600 numbers through crowd-sourced flags, users stopped trusting them altogether; legitimate businesses included.
“In the past 8 months, Truecaller users have ignored 81% of all 140-series calls and 79% of all 1600-series calls,” Jhunjhunwala stated. Blocking activity on 1600-series numbers has nearly tripled, up 208%, since October 2025, with 7.4 crore manual blocking actions recorded in that period. On an average day, Truecaller users now actively block roughly 4,00,000 calls from the 140 series and 1,25,000 from the 1600 series, data shared by the CEO revealed.
Truecaller’s response was a narrower workaround in the form of a “Frequently Blocked” badge that flags heavily blocked 1600-series numbers without formally marking them as spam.
‘TRAI asking MEITY for authority to regulate caller ID apps’
That compromise may now be at risk. According to Jhunjhunwala’s post, Truecaller had learned that TRAI is seeking authority from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to stop caller-ID apps from displaying any information at all on 140 and 1600 series numbers, including the badge.
“This makes absolutely no sense. We are the good actors who are helping hundreds of millions of Indians every day…Instead, they want to enable bad actors and give them an open playground to spam and scam us by censoring community information. We find this unacceptable,” he wrote.
Jhunjhunwala said the company would share its underlying data with MeitY, as it previously did with TRAI, to support what he described as a data-driven decision.
High spam activity or regulatory choice or both?
When viewed in their entirety, the data points to traceable causes behind India’s recent spike in ignored and unwanted calls. Notably, it is not just the rise in spam activities in general but also a regulatory choice that bars consumers access to a tool for distinguishing real businesses from bad actors.
Whether MeitY ultimately sides with tighter control over caller-ID information or with platforms that already have the scale to flag spam at a granular level will determine whether that trust gap narrows or widens further. Until then, the burden falls on businesses using the 140 and 1600 series, whose calls are being missed at record rates. And it also falls on consumers, left to decide, once again, whether an unfamiliar number is worth answering.