In a first ever virtual open house discussion, conducted by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) amid the Covid outbreak, telecom companies including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea, Reliance Jio and Tata Communications said that the 54th amendment of Telecom Tariff Order must continue as it acts as a deterrent to unsolicited commercial communication (UCC).

In December 2012, TRAI had issued the order mandating a charge of 50 paise for every SMS sent beyond the limit of 100 SMS per day per SIM.

 “It is necessary to provide a financial disincentive to Unregistered Telemarketers (UT) who would always find ways to beat the system,” Rajan Mathews, Director General, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said in the open house.

 “The present system, in our opinion, does not have strong enough disincentives for those UTs who would try and game the system and bypass its customer safeguards. The present limit of 100 SMSs a day would in no way inconvenience any legitimate customer who never reaches the cap of 100 SMSs in a day,” he added.

TRAI had said that despite the higher charge on SMS, the complaints of UCC were on a rise and thus the regime for charging for SMSes should be brought under forbearance. In 2018, TRAI had mandated telcos to adopt distributed ledger technology (DLT) with ‘permission and private DLT networks’ where only identified and registered users can participate.