TRAI has published the consultation paper titled “Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (Third Amendment), 2026” under its Quality of Service (QoS) section, seeking industry feedback on commercial SMS, user consent, sender management and spam governance mechanisms. The consultation was released on March 13, 2026, and the page indicates it has now closed. This initiative comes as TRAI continues to review the 2018 TCCCPR framework to address emerging SMS fraud tactics, digital consent processes, number portability, automated messaging and cross-operator collaboration requirements.
TRAI launched a systematic review of the TCCCPR 2018 in 2024 and issued the Second Amendment on February 12, 2025. Its upcoming regulatory priorities include preventing misuse of headers and content templates, improving digital consent collection mechanisms, enhancing the quality of operator performance reports, strengthening the identification of unregistered telemarketers, and ensuring that mobile number portability users remain properly protected by their commercial communication preferences during the number migration process.
According to the regulatory page, TRAI has issued multiple relevant directives in recent years. For instance, between August and November 2024, it ordered operators to address header and template misuse, disconnect and blacklist non-compliant senders, and submit information on violating entities. In 2025, it required operators to pilot a new digital consent collection framework in cooperation with banks regulated by the Reserve Bank of India, and standardize the process for restoring disconnected communication resources. In 2026, it further proposed sharing AI and machine learning-powered UCC Detect intelligence across operators.
These measures indicate that India’s commercial communications regulation is evolving from the basic “user registration for opt-out” model to a governance system integrating identity verification, content templates, link whitelisting, digital consent, machine-based detection, cross-network sharing and tiered penalties. For enterprises, SMS compliance is no longer merely a matter of selecting promotional or service templates. Instead, it requires ongoing maintenance of DLT registration records, consent vouchers, headers, links, number routing, and management of external service providers.
