TRAI Asks Telcos To Have One Site For DND Consent Of Customers

Are you inundated with promotional calls and messages but, at the same time, wary of sending out 'Do Not Disturb' (DND) notices all those callers and senders? The national telecom regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has come up with a solution to this common irritant.

In order to curb the menace, TRAI has directed the telecommunication service providers or telcos to develop a unified digital platform to seek, maintain and revoke customers' consent for receiving these kind of pesky calls and SMSes. The regulator has set a deadline of two months for the telcos to develop the site.

In the first phase, only subscribers will be able to initiate the process to register their consent for receiving promotional calls and SMS, and later, businesses will be able to reach out to customers to seek their consent to receive promotional messages, TRAI said in a statement.

"TRAI has now issued a direction to all the access providers to develop and deploy the Digital Consent Acquisition (DCA) facility for creating a unified platform and process to register customers' consent digitally across all service providers and principal entities," it said.

No single platform

At present, there is no unified system to show customers' consent for receiving promotional voice and text messages. The absence of a unified digital platform makes it impossible for telcos to check veracity of consents.

"Considering the volume of work involved, TRAI has allocated two months time to develop such facilities by all Access Providers and thereafter implement it in a phased manner. This direction has been issued by TRAI under its Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations, 2018," the regulator added.

Under the prevalent system, consent is obtained and maintained by the various principal entities such as banks, other financial institutions, insurance companies, trading companies, business entities, real estate companies etc.

"The DCA process shall have facility to seek, maintain and revoke the consent of customers, as per the processes envisaged under TCCCP... The consent data collected will be shared on the Digital Ledger Platform (DLT) for scrubbing by all access providers," TRAI further said.

Common short code

Access providers, which include telecom players like Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea, have been further directed to use a common short code starting with 127 for sending consent seeking messages.

"The purpose, scope of consent and principal entity or brand name shall be mentioned clearly in the consent seeking message sent through the short code," the regulator said.