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At last, TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) has heeded to mobile subscribers’ demand for ridding the nuisance of unsolicited pesky calls from telemarketers.

On the inaugural day itself, around 2.5 per cent of India’s 190 million mobile subscribers opted against receiving pesky calls.

Though prepaid subscribers form a huge percentage of total mobile subscribers, the figure of 5 million assumes great significance. About 14,750 telemarketers have also shown interest to get themselves registered with the Department of Telecommunication. The DoT (Department of Telecom) has authorised NIC (National Informatics Centre) to install, operate and maintain the NDNC (National Do Not Call) registry, which would be implemented in three phases.

The first phase provides for online registration of the subscribers who reject pesky calls and registration of telemarketers. In the second phase, the registered telemarketers have been granted a time limit of 45 days to first check their subscriber calling list with the NDNC so that registered numbers are not sent unauthorised commercial communication. In the third phase, all telemarketers will get their calling list scrubbed in the list prepared by NIC, which is being validated by TRAI. Thus the telemarketers can only call those numbers which are cleared by the NDNC registry.

As service providers and telemarketers have promised co-operation, mobile subscribers can gloat over the riddance.

*T.S. Sundareswaran, Delhi

Mobile phone ads are irksome. While marketers certainly need to advertise their products there are many unobtrusive ways to do that. Some telemarketers even go the extent of harassing people. Most of the times the calls land up when one is busy with official meetings or discussions.

Krithivasan, e-mail

More Stories on : Privacy | Sticklish Issues | Telecommunications

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