TRAI gives 3 days' time to entities for complying with telemarketing rules

Entities who need to send out bulk messages to their customers, such as those involved in banking, logistics and e-commerce, will need to complete the registration process within three days to comply with telemarketing rules, failing which they will be barred from sending out commercial communication to customers, telecom regulator Trai said on Friday.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Tuesday suspended the newly-implemented norms for commercial text messages for one week, following major disruptions in SMS and one-time password (OTP) deliveries for banking, payment, and other transactions.

The norms that pertain to content template checks and balances for text messages came into effect on Monday.

Trai said the principal entities did not complete the registration process as per the norms even after two years and they faced problems in sending out messages from application to persons like OTP and other such notifications.

"It has been decided that those principal entities that do not comply with the regulatory requirements within three days time period failing which the names of defaulting entities would be displayed on the website. Even after this period, if they fail to fulfil the regulatory requirements, they would not be allowed to send bulk communication using telecom resources," Trai said.

Principal entities, who need to send out messages, need to register with the messaging service provider, choose a header which will identify the entity in few characters, register content template, and take consumer consent.

The process was published by Trai under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), 2018, on July 19, 2018, and the regulations came into force on February 28, 2019.

Those who did not comply with regulation were to be filtered out through scrubbing.

Several entities complained about drop in traffic when scrubbing was activated on March 8, following which Trai extended the process by one week.

"Trai, hereby, once again requests all the principal entities (sender or businesses, private as well government bodies) who are using the telecom resources to send bulk messages to their customers, to fulfil the regulatory requirements immediately," Trai said.