TRAI adopts blockchain technology for spam call control in India

In order to put a halt to the spam calls in India, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued new directives to all telecom providers. The service providers are supposed to restrict promotional calls from unregistered callers. In addition, TRAI has also asked the providers to blacklist spam calls in the country as they are a major threat to the Indian nationals.

All the telecom operators in India will have to put a stop on all types of promotional calls – computer-generated, pre-recorded, or the ones from unregistered telemarketers (UTMs). TRAI secretary Atul Kumar Chaudhary mentioned that this move by TRAI will reduce spam calls and even provide relief to consumers.

Not only this, but TRAI has also introduced some punishments for offenders who don’t comply with the directive. Any unregistered telemarketer who is involved in the exploitation of telecom resources will lose all phone connection resources. And the discontinuation can go on for up to two years straight. In this period, the blacklisted UTM will not get new telecom resources from any service providers.

TRAI opts for Blockchain to control spam calls

TRAI is also adopting new-age blockchain technology or Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in order to tackle the issue of spam calls in India. The TRAI officials said that the information related to a blacklisted UTM will be shared by the Originating Access Provider (OAP) along with other access providers on the DLT platform in under 24 hours. Right after that, the UTM’s telecom resources will be disconnected for up to two years.

And that’s not it for the unregistered telemarketers, they are also supposed to migrate to TRAI’s blockchain platform in a time span of 30 days from the day they get the notice. Additionally, UTMs also have to then submit a compliance report in a time period of seven days.