Telecom companies will have to pay heavily for giving wrong reports of spam calls, TRAI will impose fine
The problem of spam calls and messages has increased rapidly in the last few years. To curb this problem, some measures have been taken by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). Under the new rules of TRAI, telecom companies giving wrong reports of spam calls and messages will be fined.
Along with this, TRAI has made it mandatory for all telecom companies to analyze calls and SMS based on parameters like very high number of calls, short duration of calls and low ratio of incoming to outgoing calls. This will help in identifying spammers quickly. The provision of graded penalty has been implemented by amending the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR). In this, telecom companies will be penalized for giving wrong reports of the number of spam calls and messages. Under the new rules, telecom companies will have to pay a penalty of Rs 2 lakh for the first violation, Rs 5 lakh for the second violation and Rs 10 lakh for each subsequent violation.
At the end of last year, TRAI had imposed a fine of about Rs 12 crore on telecom companies for failing to deal with spam calls and messages. Adding the previous fines, the total amount of the fine is about Rs 141 crore. TRAI has requested the Department of Telecom (DoT) to recover this fine. TRAI’s new rule called message traceability has been implemented from December 11. This rule will help in reducing spam messages.
The new system will be able to track the message from the person sending it to its delivery. This will help in detecting the involvement of telemarketers and other parties in sending messages. TRAI had said that this rule will not cause delay in receiving important messages like one-time password (OTP). OTP is used for banking and other services. In the new system, promotional and spam messages that are not sent by registered firms will be blocked. Many firms have registered for this. Recently, Bharti Airtel had said that more than 8 billion spam calls have been warned on its network. The company had launched a solution related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deal with the problem of spam calls and messages.
