TRAI is changing the rules. Can Truecaller adapt?

After The Telephone Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) introduced Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) to display the registered names of unknown callers directly from telecommunication providers to reduce reliance on third-party caller ID apps, they have imposed further rules regulating applications like Truecaller, preventing them from displaying spam warnings on 1600-series and 140-series numbers.

Under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Second Amendment) Regulations, 2025, numbers starting with 1600-series have been mandated for regulated entities like banks, insurance funds and financial institutions for service communications such as OTPs and payment alerts. The 140-series has been allocated to registered telemarketers for promotional calls, surveys and sales as long as it complies with the customer's Do Not Disturb preferences.

However, according to Truecaller, users continue to mark the numbers as spam, and over 51 million calls from both series go unattended daily. In a post shared on X by the Chief Executive Officer of Truecaller, Rishit Jhunjhunwala, he says that the company is now unable to warn its customers against potential spam calls.

The company mentioned that manual blocking actions against 1600- series numbers have increased by 208 per cent since October 2025, and that users ignored 79 per cent of these calls. 81 per cent of calls from 140- series numbers have also been left unattended. In total, 74 million calls have been manually blocked by users in the period, according to the application.

“This makes absolutely no sense. We are the good actors who are helping hundreds of millions of Indians every day… Instead, they want to enable bad actors and give them an open playground to spam and scam us by censoring community information,” Jhunjhunwala said.

His remarks come a day after reports said TRAI had reached out to the Ministry of Electronics and Information, asking for powers to regulate caller ID applications, in line with Truecaller introducing a "Frequently Blocked" feature for 1600- and 140 series numbers. The feature allows the app to bypass the regulations by TRAI, simply letting users know that the number is blocked often, instead of directly stating that it is a spam call.

The business models of such caller ID applications are solely based on how effectively it reveals the registered identity of unknown callers and let the user know if it is safe to be answered. With Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) already present as a mandate for telecommunication providers and new regulations that prevent the apps from listing numbers as spam or frequently blocked, the core business model itself fails to be of relevance, raising questions about whether these third-party apps will be able to sustain their business through these mandates.