TRAI in India mandates that all variable fields in SMS templates must be pre-tagged by type and subject to content cleansing and validation, preventing misuse of registered templates and ensuring that dynamic variables are used only for registered and filed business purposes.
The variable field validation mechanism will operate in logger mode from July 1, 2026: non-compliant SMS will still be delivered, while error logs will be generated for enterprise remediation. This serves only as a temporary transition measure.
The regulator will soon switch to blocker mode, under which non-compliant SMS will be directly rejected for delivery. The notice requires principal enterprises to review all SMS templates used in the past 90 days, complete pre-tagging of all variable fields, monitor delivery errors, and coordinate remediation with their access service providers. All remediation work must be completed within 30 days, by 2026-10-17, to prevent service disruption to legitimate commercial communications.
India’s DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) SMS regulation is being further tightened; dynamic placeholders in templates are no longer allowed to contain unrestricted free text. OTP, notification, and marketing SMS that are not correctly tagged will be directly blocked going forward. Financial and securities enterprises should proactively audit their existing templates and promptly correct issues based on error receipts.
