TRAI Regulations – Sending SMS in India

Correspondence about allowing Promotional communication from alpha headers, cessation of Service Explicit messaging and migration of SE templates into Promo

Please take note that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), in accordance with the Telecom Commercial Communication Consumer Preference Regulation, 2018, has issued a Regulatory Directive on February 16, 2023, outlining steps to “Curb misuse of Headers and Content Templates.” In line with these Directions, and with a view to further manage your commercial communication effectively, the industry is taking the following steps with effect from 1st May 2023.

• Promotional messages will now be sent using alpha headers – in fulfilment of the sender industry’s long-standing demand, we will permit promotional traffic also from alpha headers, which will help you assert the PE’s identity and trust. All numeric headers used for sending Promo traffic up until now, will be blocked, and no traffic from numeric headers will be passed. So, all promo/service/transactional traffic will now be allowed to be sent from alpha headers, and the same alpha header can be used for all types of communication.

• Service Explicit (SE) traffic will now be treated at par with Promo category – in view of unceasing spam and frauds from SE route, all existing SE templates will be migrated to Promo category and sent after Preference/Consent scrubbing only, thus saving your genuine subscribers from unwanted spam and potential fraud. No more SE templates will be registered going forward. There will only be 3 categories of message templates – Promo, Service (implicit/inferred) and Transactional (only banking OTP). Promo messages will be allowed to be sent only to non-DND subscribers and those who have given digital consent to you for sending such communication.

• All existing consents/opt-ins will be treated invalid and only Digitally Acquired and Verified consents will be used for scrubbing promotional (including the migrated SE) content.

As your preferred DLT Service partner, we will attempt to review all your SI templates and block any/all which can potentially be used for marketing purposes, but the ownership for complaints against misuse of these templates will still lie with yourselves.