The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has issued fresh directions clarifying that call management applications cannot block, tag or filter calls originating from the 1600-series numbering range. Under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, TRAI stated plainly that any tagging, blocking or filtering of calls from 1600-series numbers is not permitted.
The 1600 series has been mandated exclusively for service and transactional calls made by entities regulated by the Reserve Bank of India, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India and the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority, as well as for government-to-citizen communication. TRAI said the objective is to make such calls trustworthy for citizens by ensuring they reach recipients without being wrongly flagged as spam.
A Parallel Rule for Promotional Calls
TRAI also clarified the regulatory position on the 140-series range, allocated to registered telemarketers for promotional and marketing calls. Such calls cannot be arbitrarily tagged or filtered by call management apps either. Instead, customers who do not want promotional communications must register their preference through the Do Not Disturb registry, accessible via the TRAI DND app and other official channels.
The regulator said any tagging or filtering of 140-series calls outside the DND mechanism risks misleading customers who may have already consented to receive calls from a particular sector, undermining the very consent framework the DND registry is meant to enforce.
Truecaller Pushes Back With Its Own Data
The clarification has not gone unchallenged. Truecaller chief executive Rishit Jhunjhunwala publicly contested TRAI’s approach, arguing that spammers are actively abusing the no-tagging directive. He cited figures showing spam calls through the 140 and 1600 series have surged to over 5.1 crore unanswered calls daily across both series, with daily blocking actions on the 1600 series alone tripling, up 208 percent, since October 2025, and 7.4 crore manual blocking actions recorded by users over the past eight months.
Jhunjhunwala noted that Truecaller users currently block roughly 4 lakh calls from the 140 series and 1.25 lakh calls from the 1600 series every day, figures he said prove citizens themselves are identifying many of these calls as unwanted, regardless of the series they originate from. The dispute has since escalated beyond public statements: TRAI has formally sought authorisation from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to take enforcement action against apps found violating its norms, a move that could carry real legal and operational consequences for Truecaller and similar platforms such as Hiya and Whoscall in one of their largest global markets.
Telecommunications experts note the clarification reinforces a broader distinction between verified institutional communication and unsolicited promotional calls, but caution that consumers should not judge a call’s authenticity by its displayed number alone. Fraudsters routinely spoof legitimate-looking numbers, and experts stress that sensitive information such as OTPs, passwords, PINs and banking credentials should never be shared over any phone call, irrespective of how official the caller claims to be or which numbering series the call appears to originate from.
