In a breather for bulk message senders, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Tuesday said it was suspending the Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC) norms for seven days to enable principal entities (PEs) register the template of SMS with telecom service providers (TSPs).

The development follows disruptions to several services and transactions such as net banking, credit card payments, and rail ticket bookings on Monday as SMS and one-time passwords (OTPs) could not be generated on customers’ devices, with TSPs implementing the new rules for unwanted commercial messages, called scrubbing.

Regulations

To curb the pesky message menace — mainly related to banking, insurance, real estate, local services and offers on earning money — , TRAI had issued the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations in 2018.

This mandated PEs to register the template of the SMS they want to send out via a telecom service provider. The Regulations provide for registration of senders, telemarketers, headers, and content/consent templates. A message not matching a template will be suspended.

In January 2020, all TSPs were asked to onboard the PEs or senders of messages.

However, TRAI said, “it has been observed that some of the PEs have not fulfilled the requirements as envisaged in the 2018 Regulations. As a result, their SMS were getting dropped after implementation of the scrubbing of SMS by TSPs.”

“...it has been decided that scrubbing of SMS by TSPs shall be suspended for seven days to enable the PEs to register the template of SMS so that no inconvenience is faced by the customers,” the regulator’s statement said.

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said that TSPs have sent several communications to PEs to register their content template before March 7, 2021. We request all PEs to get their content template registered with TSPs at the earliest, and help address the issue of UCC,” COAI Director-Genaral SP Kochhar said.

In a LocalCircles (a community social media platform) survey, 73 per cent of the 35,000 respondents from 324 districts said they get four or more unwanted SMS every day The survey was to assess the effect of TRAI’s DND, or ‘Do Not Disturb’ initiative on UCC. The survey found that in the last two years, there had been a small dip in the volume of unsolicited SMS received by citizens, which could be attributed to lockdowns and office shutdowns.

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Uday Reddy, Chairman & CEO, Tanla said, "We welcome the TRAI’s move to allow enterprises and telemarketers more time to comply with the TCCCPR regulation. Tanla’s DLT platform Trubloq was created to empower users and block spam calls and messages and enable enterprises build trust and faith with end users in the commercial communications domain. Towards this objective, Tanla is working closely with enterprises and telemarketers by supporting them to register their content templates and ensure conformity with the regulation.”

“Since Trubloq’s commercial launch on September 01 2020, the platform is operating at full efficiency. Tanla has onboarded more than 34,000 enterprises and the DLT platform currently processes around 70% of A2P traffic in India, topping more than 1 billion interactions in a single day recently.”

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