Truecaller CEO says TRAI’s rules made India’s spam call problem worse

Truecaller CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala has publicly accused the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) of worsening India’s spam call problem, saying the regulator’s own rules bar the app from warning users about spam on the 140 and 1600 number series. In a July 8 post on X, he said Truecaller followed TRAI’s directive to whitelist those numbers “even though [it] had concerns about whether the regulator could issue such instructions to apps.”

That concern points to a contradiction. TRAI ordered a caller-ID app to stop flagging certain numbers, yet caller-ID apps sit outside its jurisdiction, and the regulator is now asking the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for the authority to regulate them, as per MediaNama’s recent report.

How did TRAI reach an app it does not regulate? TRAI licenses telecom operators through the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). Caller-ID apps are not telecom operators; they are intermediaries under the Information Technology Act (IT Act), which places them under MeitY. TRAI reached them anyway through its own regulations.

• Its February 2025 TCCCPR amendments created the 140 series for telemarketing and the 1600 series for banking and financial calls and stated that third-party call-management apps must not block or tag calls from these series.
• In late 2025, it directed caller-ID apps to whitelist the two series, so Truecaller cannot mark those numbers as spam even when its own users report them.

What is TRAI now asking for? TRAI has asked MeitY to designate it an “authorised agency” under the IT Act, which would let it act directly against apps such as Truecaller, Hiya, and Whoscall. Its draft TCCCPR amendments would:

• require the apps to share their spam reports with telecom operators’ Do Not Disturb registry,
• prohibit them from blocking or tagging 140 and 1600-series calls, and
• let TRAI invoke the IT Act and IT Rules against non-compliant apps, with repeated non-compliance risking their Section 79 safe harbour.

MeitY, with DoT, has agreed to take the demand forward, as per officials cited by The Economic Times.

Why does TRAI want this, and why does the industry object? TRAI argues the apps wrongly tag legitimate commercial calls, one-time passwords, payment alerts, and account updates, pushing enterprises back to ordinary 10-digit numbers and worsening the distrust the number series were meant to fix.

The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), which represents the apps, opposes the move:

• TRAI is exceeding its statutory remit by trying to regulate intermediaries that fall outside telecom…