New Delhi, July 9: Telecom regulator Trai has sought authorisation from the IT ministry to act against call management apps like Truecaller, sources aware of the development said.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has already floated a draft regulation to tighten the noose on pesky and fraudulent calls with a provision to regulate call management apps â?” a move which has been countered by caller identification app Truecaller CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala.
“Trai has sought authorisation from MeitY to regulate the functioning of the call management app for robust action against spam and fraud calls. Discussions have been held with the Department of Telecom as well. The authorisation will help in making apps and service providers more accountable towards unsolicited calls,” a source, who did not wish to be named, told PTI.
The regulator in the Draft Telecom Commercial Communication Preference (Third Amendment) Regulations, 2026, has included provisions for call management apps.
The proposed regulation seeks that no call management app or similar services for identification of pesky calls and sms shall tag, block, filter or give any treatment to calls meant for genuine communication or restrict incoming calls originating from any number series designated for commercial communications.
In the draft regulation, Trai has proposed for tagging or blocking calls originating from number series starting from 140 (for telemarketing calls) or 1600 meant for banking, financial services, and insurance companies to make service- or transaction-related calls.
Jhunjhunwala, in a social media post, said that while the intent to issue designated series might sound good on paper, there has been a huge increase in spam calls through 140 and 1600 number series.
“Truecaller has actually helped hundreds of millions of Indians every single day for 17 years, and now they want to censor/suppress trusted information from people? â?¦What happened was that the number of spam calls made through the 140/1600 number series skyrocketed! Over 51 million calls from both series go unanswered every single day,” he said.
He said there is a massive increase in the number of reported spam and scam calls by the Truecaller community, even though the app is now allowed to show them.
“This happened in front of our eyes, and we are mandated not to tell our users that those calls are spam. Later, we saw more interesting trends: people stopped answering calls from 140/1600 numbers because of a lack of trust. In the past 8 months, Truecaller users have ignored 81 per cent of all 140-series calls and 79 per cent of all 1600-series calls,” Jhunjhunwala said.
He said some of the calls are, of course, legitimate, which Truecaller would have displayed with its verified badge, and consumers would have answered these calls.
“Instead, consumers and legit businesses both lost out. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone. Specifically with the 1600 series, reserved for service/transaction related calls, we have seen daily blocking actions triple (up by 208 per cent) since October 2025. A total of 7.4 crore (74 million) manual blocking actions have been taken against these series in the past 8 months,” Jhunjhunwala added. (PTI)
