Truecaller has opened a public combat with India’s telecom regulator over guidelines governing caller ID apps, saying the nation’s anti-spam framework is making it tougher to guard customers from undesirable calls in its greatest market.
On Wednesday, CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala (pictured above) took to X to publicly problem the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), accusing the watchdog of stopping Truecaller from displaying community-reported spam data for calls from the nation’s devoted 1400 and 1600 quantity collection, a restriction he mentioned had enabled abuse of these numbers and eroded belief in legit enterprise calls.
The dispute stems from a framework launched in 2024 underneath which India’s telecom authorities designated the 1400 and 1600 quantity collection for industrial communications, with companies utilizing the previous for telemarketing calls and the latter for service- and transaction-related calls. TRAI later mandated the migration to the devoted numbering collection, saying the transfer would assist customers establish legit enterprise communications and curb spam and rip-off calls.
The framework was rolled out amid rising considerations over spam and rip-off calls in India, one of many world’s largest telecom markets, the place regulators and telecom operators have rolled out a number of measures to curb fraudulent communications. Final 12 months, the Indian communications ministry mentioned authorities disconnected greater than 2.1 million fraudulent cell numbers and took motion in opposition to greater than 100,000 entities over the previous 12 months, underscoring the dimensions of the problem.
Jhunjhunwala argued the coverage has produced unintended penalties. Citing inner firm information, he mentioned customers have more and more misplaced belief within the designated quantity collection, with Truecaller customers ignoring 81% of calls from the 1400 collection and 79% from the 1600 collection over the previous eight months. Throughout the identical interval, customers manually blocked 74 million calls from the 2 quantity collection, whereas each day blocking actions in opposition to 1600-series numbers have greater than tripled since October 2025, he mentioned.
Unable to mark these numbers as spam, Truecaller as a substitute launched a “Often Blocked” badge to alert customers when a quantity from the designated collection has been blocked by many individuals.
The unusually public criticism got here after Indian enterprise each day The Financial Occasions reported that TRAI had sought powers underneath India’s Data Expertise Act to take motion in opposition to caller ID apps equivalent to Truecaller, Hiya, and Whoscall for labeling numbers from the designated 1400 and 1600 collection as spam.
TRAI and India’s Ministry of Electronics and Data Expertise, which might think about any such proposal, didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
The dispute comes at a pivotal time for Truecaller, whose core caller ID enterprise has been dealing with rising regulatory and aggressive pressures as the corporate expands into new services and products. India stays its largest market by a large margin, with greater than 350 million of its 500 million month-to-month lively customers primarily based within the nation, based on the corporate.
Jhunjhunwala mentioned Truecaller would share its information with the Indian IT ministry as a part of the regulatory course of, arguing that any resolution on caller ID apps must be evidence-based.
“Penalize the unhealthy actors, not those like Truecaller that make a big optimistic impression,” he wrote.
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