TRAI telemarketing rules: what the 2025 amendment asks of businesses that call

The main TRAI rules for telemarketing are the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2018, as changed by a Second Amendment published on 12 February 2025. They cover any business that sends promotional, service or transactional calls and messages. Three duties stand out for a business that phones customers. First, a sender of commercial communication must be registered with a telecom operator, and an unregistered sender's telecom resources may be suspended or disconnected. Second, commercial calls must come from registered headers or from numbers in the special series set aside for commercial use. Third, a sender using an auto dialer or robo-calls must tell its operator in writing, in advance, and say what the calls are for. Promotional calls may reach only people who have not blocked them or who have consented. NLCaller, a call management app, rings one number after another through the SIM inside the handset, and a real person handles each call; deciding whether those calls are promotional rests with the business making them.

The sections below set out who must do what, how the calls are classified, and what happens to senders who break the rules. Each point names the part of the regulation it comes from.

The amendment rewrote the definitions. A promotional voice call is any commercial call containing promotional material or an advertisement for a product or service, and a call that mixes promotional content with anything else counts as promotional (regulation 2(av)). A service call goes to a business's own customer with information about a product or service they use, such as warranty, product recall, software upgrade, safety, balance or delivery details, and must not be promotional; a second kind of service call, made to complete an ongoing purchase, needs explicit consent that lasts seven days or as TRAI directs (regulation 2(bh)). A transactional call or message responds to a transaction the customer started, within thirty minutes of it, such as a bank OTP (regulation 2(bt)). Government messages and calls form a separate category that needs no consent and cannot be blocked through preferences (regulation 2(za)).

On number ranges, TRAI's explanatory memorandum to the amendment says promotional calls should be permitted through 140-series numbers only, and that the Department of Telecommunications had recently allotted the 1600 series for transactional and service calls (paragraphs 18 and 50). Our page on the 140 series number covers both ranges.

NLCaller places calls through the SIM card already in a salesperson's phone, one at a time, and a person is on the line for every call. It does not provide registered headers, 140 or 1600 series numbers, recorded voice broadcasts or robo-calls. Its auto dialer moves through a list hands-free, so if your calls count as commercial communication, raise regulation 4's advance written notice with your telecom operator. How each attempt on a list of strangers gets logged is explained on the CRM for cold calling page.

Whether a particular call is promotional, service or transactional depends on who you ring and what you say, and that judgement belongs to your business. If someone asks not to be called again, add the number to NLCaller's excluded numbers, which keeps it out of all the app's automation. Independent sellers calling their own circle can read how this works for them in the CRM for network marketing. Customers' own blocking choices are covered in our guide to DND rules for telemarketing.