The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has finalized amendments to its Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR) that require businesses using automated calling systems to declare such calls to their telecom service providers. According to the latest reports, these amendments, first proposed for consultation in March, are now being implemented to address the growing challenge of distinguishing legitimate automated business calls from spam, scams, and impersonation attempts as AI voice agents become more common. Under the new framework, telecom service providers will identify numbers with a high probability of being used for sending spam and share this information among themselves. The authority has also introduced a consumer appeal mechanism to strengthen oversight and address complaints more effectively.
The amended regulations introduce a comprehensive action mechanism for suspected spam detection. Where three or more unique consumer complaints are flagged within 10 days, further investigation and graded action will follow, including KYC re-verification, physical verification, barring of outgoing services and disconnection in cases of repeated violations. As reported by Business Standard, Trai has also strengthened complaint-based action and safeguards against misuse of headers and content templates. The authority has prohibited call-management applications from blanket blocking, filtering or spam-tagging calls from designated number series, with this provision now included directly in the regulation rather than just as a direction. However, caller ID apps like Truecaller will no longer be able to blanket-block calls without sharing spam reports via the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform.
The new regulations have drawn criticism from major caller ID platforms, with Truecaller calling the spam reporting mandate 'anti-competitive' in an interaction with TechCrunch. As per the company, 42 billion spam calls were made in India in 2025, with India being the biggest market for the Stockholm-based company, hosting more than 350 million out of its 500 million monthly active users. A Truecaller spokesperson noted that while the company has been compliant with previous orders to unlock calls from designated numbers, it had introduced a badge that flagged these calls based on user feedback. The company argues that spam has skyrocketed due to what it describes as a free pass to spammers, highlighting the significant impact these regulations will have on the caller ID industry.
The timing of these regulatory changes is significant given the scale of spam detection currently occurring. As reported by government data, telecom operators' AI-based systems flagged 22.99 billion incoming calls as suspected spam during the April-June quarter of FY2026-27. Additionally, consumers filed 3.1 million Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC) complaints across channels in 2025, including 1.7 million through the Trai DND app. Trai also issued more than 7.31 lakh notices to unregistered telemarketers during the year.
Businesses are increasingly deploying AI voice agents at substantial scale, creating new challenges for spam detection. According to the report, Sarvam says its systems handle more than 2 million voice conversations a day, while Mahindra Finance and Sarvam recently reported that their voice agents had completed more than 10 million calls across 12 Indian languages. Trai has now defined Application-to-Person (A2P) calls as calls initiated by an application, software system or automated platform without direct human dialling, including autodialling, robocalls and pre-recorded or artificial voice technologies. This classification brings AI-based calls under the regulatory framework for the first time. Entities using A2P calls will have to pre-declare their use and the numbers being used to their telecom service provider, while calls made without such declaration will be treated as UCC.
