TRAI Suspends New Rules to Check Spam Messages Post Adoption Sparked Chaos

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has suspended new rules to check spam messages. The step was taken post their adoption beginning Monday sparked chaos due to major disruptions in SMS and OTP deliveries for banking, payment and other transactions.

Several banks failed to generate SMSes and OTPs that affected services such as net banking, Aadhar-enabled transactions, credit card payments, railway ticket bookings and vaccine registrations.

The norm that pertain to content template checks and balances for text messages came into effect on Monday. This suspension would help banks, commercial entities, sending out messages and OTPs to customers, and even provide them time to comply with stipulated requirements.

The move to suspend the norms would enable the principal entities to register the SMS template so that no inconvenience is faced by customers. TRAI said, “In order to protect the interest of consumers, it has been decided that scrubbing of SMS by telecom service providers shall be suspended temporarily for seven days”.

The telecom operators have been asked by the regulator to inform their principal entities to take immediate necessary action in this regard and facilitate their registration, including SMS template, in a time-bound manner.

TRAI had issues the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulation in July 2018 to effectively deal with the nuisance of spam. However, TRAI noted in a statement that even though telcos implemented the scrubbing norms, some companies did not adopt them, leading to text messages getting dropped and transaction failures.

Telecom operators, on the other hand, said several firms and government bodies faced glitches as they did not register their content template till 7 March despite multiple reminders.