TRAI levies Rs 2.81 crore on Bharti Airtel for failure to curb UCC

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has levied a Rs 2.81 crore fine on Bharti Airtel for failing to curb the menace of unsolicited commercial communications (UCC) in the quarter ended December 2021.

“…we hereby submit the details of the order issued to the company by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018,” Airtel said in a regulatory filing recently.

Airtel said TRAI has levied a “financial disincentive” of Rs 2,81,39,000 for “failure to curb the UCC sent through the company’s network for the complaints as required under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018, for the quarter ended December 2021”.

The telco added that it reviewing the order and “evaluating the next steps in this matter”.

Recently, the sector watchdog asked the telecom operators to share data among themselves to check the menace of pesky and fraudulent messages.

Unwanted texts and calls have become one of the top pain areas for mobile subscribers, forcing the regulator to take necessary steps to come to their rescue.

ETTelecom in its September 11 edition reported that Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea have completed the TCCCPR trials for voice and are readying a strategy to implement the regulatory framework.

“The framework is already ready. Trials have been done, and very soon it (TCCCPR) will be rolled out. So, voice will also get regulated for this,” SP Kochhar, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) told ETTelecom previously.

Following TRAI’s direction to use whitelisted weblinks, telcos have recently tightened the process to curb the misuse of message templates to discourage UCC.

In 2018, the regulator unveiled the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations or TCCCPR that laid out a framework that mandated service providers to block unsolicited commercial texts on networks, encouraging the use of assigned headers by registered senders or entities.

Telcos received 904,359 complaints in calendar year 2022 compared to 855,771 complaints in 2021 and 307,043 complaints in 2020 (April-December period) for UCC, minister of state for communications Devusinh Chauhan stated in Lok Sabha in July.