A survey conducted by ‘LocalCircles’ in the year 2022 revealed that almost 64 per cent of Indians received three or more spam calls on their phones every day. These are mostly related to financial services, and real estate offers. Many a time these Unwanted Commercial Calls (UCC) are from the regular 10-digit mobile numbers which are used by Unregistered Telemarketers (UTMs).

To address this issue, TRAI enacted a new regulation in July 2018, ‘The Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018’, introducing Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for the National Do Not Call (NDNC) registry. Indian telecom sector has implemented blockchain for pesky calls.

DLT or Blockchain technology facilitates smart record-keeping with integrated business rules and authenticate telememarketers (TM) and Telecom Service providers (TSP) using digital signatures. TRAI mandated TSPs should adopt “permissioned” and private DLT networks to control pesky calls.

The proposed DLT solution is supported by a Cloud-based solution for scrubbing commercial messages and managing the complaint process.

TSPs now implement various DLT-based solutions. These DLT solutions should be integrated soon to reduce the time lag between data sharing and facilitate verification of the genuineness of the complaints and protect innocent customers from disconnection of telecom resources due to false complaints.

In contrast, in 2007 TRAI had recommended a centralised NDNC under Telecom UCC Regulation. The centralised NDNC registry or database, was established by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) where the TMs submitted their calling list and got back the filtered list of customers to whom they can make marketing calls. TSPs periodically updated the NDNC database. TSPs were asked to provision, separate message headers for marketing and transactional messages and also separate number series for telemarketing (TM) to control UCC from unregistered telemarketers (UTMs).

Telecom customers can send SMSs to opt in or out of NDNC registry. The NDNC system took about 24 hours to register preferences and required up to seven days to enforce the revised preferences. The time required to resolve UCC complaints and take action against the defaulter was more than seven days. Unscrupulous TMs exploited this long-time window to its fullest.

Several factors hindered the achievement objectives of the 2007 UCC regulations using the NDNC registry like: entities from every nook and corner of the India participating and TMs joining for a short period to target customers of a limited geographical area.

Blockchain benefits

The implementation of Blockchain technology to control pesky calls has several benefits. Such DLT solutions helps to record, store and process data and execute speedily in a distributed environment. The DLT facilitates data sharing and transparency cross multiple TSPs. The records of different entities are stored in an immutable manner so that participating entities can trust each other. Securing the data through a DLT would also prevent it from landing in the hands of Unregistered Telemarketers (UTMs).

Customers shall be able to define their preferences at a granular level. They can set preferences about days and time bands to receive commercial communications. Faster resolution of complaints and visibility of the status of the resolution shall be added advantages. For TSPs, the blockchain technology will ease the pain of data sharing and reduce regulatory burden. DLT-based solutions shall reduce the onboarding and operational costs for TMs and help them become compliant with the regulations.

The DLT-based UCC solution is a win-win scenario for all.

Mukhopadhay is Professor, IT & Systems, IIM Lucknow; Guru and Jain are PhD students at IIM Lucknow