India has expanded its anti-spam regime to require caller ID and call management apps to share users’ spam reports with telecom operators, prompting spam-blocking app maker Truecaller to call the ruling anti-competitive.
On Friday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the country’s telecom regulator, modified rules governing business communications, making it mandatory for caller ID and call management applications that allow users to flag calls as spam or junk to send those reports to a blockchain-based platform maintained by telecom operators. The platform tracks commercial communications and enforces anti-spam rules.
The change, TRAI said, is aimed at expanding the set of spam reports available to take action against spammers, effectively connecting reports collected by apps with the telecom industry’s law enforcement infrastructure.
However, Truecaller told TechCrunch that it views this requirement as a “one-way exchange” that is “anti-competitive,” arguing that it transfers commercially valuable data from call management apps like itself to telecom operators.
India is Truecaller’s largest market and represents more than 350 million his more than 500 million monthly active users globally. The Stockholm-based company uses community reporting along with auto-detection and other signals to identify and block unwanted calls.
The rules come at a time when India is fighting spam and scam calls on a huge scale. In its February report, Truecaller said its users in the country found around 42 billion spam calls in 2025, including blocked, tagged or ignored calls. The company also claimed that it blocked nearly 12 billion unwanted calls during the year.
This is not the first time Truecaller and the Indian regulator have disagreed over how spam calls should be handled. The Swedish company formerly opposed the restrictions Prevent call management applications from automatically labeling calls from certain government-designated number ranges as spam. It argued that the exemption could allow unwanted calls to escape its filters.
However, Friday’s amendments maintain that restriction and have prohibited call management applications from blocking, filtering or labeling as spam calls from designated number series used for promotional, service and transactional communications. Individual users can still choose to block such calls on their own devices, the regulator said.
“While our data and user feedback clearly shows that spam has skyrocketed due to this free pass for spammers, we have been compliant with this since late last year,” a Truecaller spokesperson said.
Sumeysh Srivastava, a partner at New Delhi-based consulting firm The Quantum Hub, who leads its telecom regulatory policy work, said the latest change brings together two distinct layers: telecom operators provide the underlying network and run the blockchain-based anti-spam system, while caller ID applications operate on top of the network to identify and filter calls.
That raises technical and jurisdictional issues, Srivastava told TechCrunch, including what reporting standards apps will have to follow and how the requirement will be enforced against companies that are not telecom operators.
A draft from March proposed (PDF) using Indian IT laws to enforce the requirement. However, Srivastava noted that the new announcement did not say whether that enforcement mechanism was retained in the final rules.
It is also unclear how much information apps will actually have to provide under the updated regulation. Kazim Rizvi, founding director of New Delhi-based policy think tank The Dialogue, told TechCrunch that requiring an app to transmit a specific spam report made by a user is materially different from requiring it to share broader data sets, reputation signals, or analytics systems it uses to identify suspicious calls.
The rules will need clarity about what information must be transmitted, how users are notified or asked for consent, and how that data can be retained and used later, Rizvi said.
TRAI did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about what information apps should share and whether the rule would also apply to spam reporting features built into smartphone operating systems and dialers like Android and iOS.
New rules for AI-based calls
The amendments also address the increasing use of AI software and voice agents to make calls. Calls made automatically, without a person directly dialing the number, will now be included in TRAI’s application-to-person (A2P) framework. That includes robocalls and calls with prerecorded or artificial voices.
Companies that use these systems must declare their use and the telephone numbers involved to their telecommunications operators in advance. Undeclared A2P calls will be treated as spam, TRAI said.
The key test, Srivastava said, is how a call is initiated, rather than simply whether it uses an AI-generated voice, leaving some uncertainty around AI-assisted calls that involve human initiation.
Satya N. Gupta, former additional secretary of TRAI, told TechCrunch that the new rules do not restrict companies from using artificial intelligence or other robocalling technologies, but rather require them to disclose their use to telecom operators.
Telecom operators will also be able to charge a termination charge of up to 5 paise (about 0.052 cents) per minute on A2P calls. However, calls made using certain designated number ranges will be exempt.
Rizvi told TechCrunch that the new definition could also cover calls made using software even when a person is still involved, such as calls from contact centers and click-to-call services. “Without that distinction, the A2P category risks becoming broader than the regulatory harm it purports to address,” he said.
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