Ineffective interventions

Spam calls must be stopped

The Department of Telecommunications has reportedly decided to take up the issue of pesky calls and messages as a priority area once the new government is formed. This is reported to be part of the 100-day agenda the Prime Minister’s Office has asked every Union ministry and government department to work on. If executed well, tackling pesky calls/messages or unsolicited communication will go a long way in promoting both ease of living and ease of doing business — two critical benchmarks for development. The effort to contain unsolicited communication, commonly referred to as spam, however, is not a new initiative. For years, the government has been struggling to clean up the system through regulations and directions, first by bringing in a “Do Not Disturb Registry” and then various versions of the unsolicited commercial communications law. But the rising instances of spam calls and messages show the efforts to contain them, even by using blockchain and artificial intelligence, have failed.
 

One of the reasons why efforts to check spam have not been effective is that the attacker (creator of spam, usually a telemarketing company) moves faster than the regulator. Also, some telecom-service providers are not in compliance with the codes of practice but they are hardly penalised. In principle, the penalty on service providers for failing to curb pesky calls and SMSes on their network is Rs 34.99 crore — this was reiterated in a Parliament reply last year. After many variations across years, the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulations were issued in 2018, followed by six directions by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai). According to the regulations which came into force in February 2019, seeking customer consent for receiving promotional messages and registration of telemarketers is mandatory.
 

India is not alone in this but the country’s spam market is on a high. Truecaller, which has 400 million monthly users around the world, said last week that India continued to remain its largest market, accounting for 74.2 per cent of its net sales in the first quarter of the calendar year 2024. India contributed Rs 244.2 crore to Truecaller’s operating revenue in the quarter, up 8.8 per cent year-on-year. On the operational front, the Swedish company’s average number of global monthly active users rose by 39 million to 383.4 million. Of this total, 272.6 million were from India alone. Truecaller, which identifies and warns the user about scammers and telemarketers, gave a glimpse into the global scenario in a recent report, highlighting that US residents had to struggle with an average of 2.1 billion spam calls on a monthly basis.
 

What can the government do now to check the menace? One of the recommendations of Trai is that all network operators should implement the calling-name display service on mobile phones and that all smartphone makers should be mandated to enable this feature within a stipulated time. Calling-name presentation, or CNAP, has to be formalised through guidelines. Also, the DoT is planning multiple interventions within the first 100 days of the new government. For instance, a new inter-ministerial panel is being proposed to check spam, there will be updates to the Chakshu portal, and the mandatory implementation of artificial intelligence-based digital consent-acquisition technology will come into play. A separate numbering series can also be planned for transactional versus marketing calls.