The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has amended the commercial communications regulations to require caller identification and call management apps that allow users to report spam calls to send those reports to a blockchain-based platform operated by telecom companies. The platform is used to track commercial communications and enforce rules against unsolicited calls.
The authority says the goal is to expand the pool of reports available for taking action against spam callers by connecting the data collected by apps with the infrastructure telecom companies use for enforcement. But Truecaller, the largest app in this field, described the requirement as one-way and anti-competitive, arguing that it transfers commercially valuable data collected by call management apps to telecom companies.
A Large Market and a Dispute Over Data
India is Truecaller’s largest market, with more than 350 million of the app’s more than 500 million monthly active users worldwide. The Swedish company relies on community reports, along with automated detection and other signals, to identify and block spam calls.
The decision comes amid a high volume of spam and fraudulent calls in India. Truecaller said in a report released in February that its users in the country faced around 42 billion spam calls during 2025, including calls that were blocked, labeled, or ignored, while the company said it blocked nearly 12 billion of them.
The amendment does not end an earlier dispute between Truecaller and the regulator. The company had objected to restrictions preventing call management apps from labeling calls from certain number ranges that the government automatically designates as spam calls. The new rules retain this exception and also prevent apps from broadly blocking, filtering, or labeling calls originating from ranges assigned to promotional, service, and transactional communications. Users can still block these calls individually on their devices.
Open Questions About the Scope of Data Sharing
The amendment links two different layers: telecom companies that operate the network and the anti-spam-call platform, and apps that operate over the network to identify and filter calls. According to Sumeysh Srivastava, a partner at Indian consulting firm The Quantum Hub, this raises questions about reporting standards and how the requirement will apply to companies that are not telecom operators.
It is also unclear whether the requirement is limited to a specific report submitted by a user or extends to the datasets, reputation signals, and analytical systems apps use to detect suspicious calls. Kazim Rizvi, founding director of research center The Dialogue, pointed to the need to define what information will be transferred, how users will be notified or asked for consent, and how the data may be retained and used later. TRAI did not clarify whether the rule will cover reporting features built into operating systems and calling software such as Android and iOS.
Regulating Automated Calls and Voice Agents
The amendments cover software-initiated calls and AI-powered voice agents. Calls made automatically without a person directly requesting the number will be included in the application-to-person (A2P) communications framework, including automated calls and calls using recorded or synthetic voices.
Companies using these systems must disclose their use and the relevant telephone numbers to telecom companies in advance. Unreported A2P calls will be treated as spam calls. Telecom companies may also impose a termination charge of up to 5 paise, or approximately 0.052 cents, per minute of A2P calls, with certain number ranges exempted.
In practice, the regulatory test focuses on how the call is initiated, not solely on whether the voice is AI-generated. As a result, the rule’s boundaries remain unsettled for calls involving a human employee, such as call centers and click-to-call services. Experts quoted by TechCrunch believe that the absence of this distinction could make the A2P category broader than the harm the regulation was designed to address.