Press Information Bureau

Government of India

Ministry of Communications & Information Technology

07-December-2012 16:13 IST

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had issued “The Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Tenth Amendment) Regulations, 2012” on 5th November, 2012 prescribing further measures to tighten the framework for controlling the menace of unsolicited commercial communications (UCC).

Under such regulations, TRAI has facilitated the easy lodging of UCC complaints through SMS mode by forwarding the UCC SMS to 1909 by appending the telephone number/ SMS header and date of receipt of SMS. It has come to the notice of TRAI through several complaints that some of the Access Providers have not implemented the above revised procedure for lodging of UCC complaints through forwarding of SMS. Meanwhile, the compliance in this regard was sought from the Access Providers and it was found that all the Access Providers have implemented the same except M/s Idea Cellular Ltd.

The Authority has initiated action against such Access Provider.

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MV/RK

 

UCC SMS complaint mechanism: non-implementation by an access provider prompted regulatory action to enforce forwarding requirement. The amendment requires Access Providers to implement an SMS-based UCC complaint mechanism by forwarding received UCC SMS to the prescribed short code with the originating telephone number or SMS header and date appended; compliance checks found one Access Provider had not implemented this forwarding requirement, and the regulator initiated action against that provider for non compliance.