Truecaller has opened a public fight with India’s telecom regulator over rules governing caller ID apps, saying the country’s anti-spam framework is making it harder to guard consumers from unwanted calls in its biggest market.
On Wednesday, CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala (pictured above) took to X to publicly challenge the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), accusing the watchdog of stopping Truecaller from displaying community-reported spam information for calls from the country’s dedicated 1400 and 1600 number series, a restriction he said had enabled abuse of those numbers and eroded trust in legitimate business calls.
The dispute stems from a framework introduced in 2024 under which India’s telecom authorities designated the 1400 and 1600 number series for business communications, with businesses using the previous for telemarketing calls and the latter for service- and transaction-related calls. TRAI later mandated the migration to the dedicated numbering series, saying the move would help consumers discover legitimate business communications and curb spam and scam calls.
The framework was rolled out amid growing concerns over spam and scam calls in India, certainly one of the world’s largest telecom markets, where regulators and telecom operators have rolled out multiple measures to curb fraudulent communications. Last 12 months, the Indian communications ministry said authorities disconnected greater than 2.1 million fraudulent mobile numbers and took motion against greater than 100,000 entities over the preceding 12 months, underscoring the size of the challenge.
Jhunjhunwala argued the policy has produced unintended consequences. Citing internal company data, he said consumers have increasingly lost trust within the designated number series, with Truecaller users ignoring 81% of calls from the 1400 series and 79% from the 1600 series over the past eight months. Through the same period, users manually blocked 74 million calls from the 2 number series, while day by day blocking actions against 1600-series numbers have greater than tripled since October 2025, he said.
Unable to mark those numbers as spam, Truecaller as an alternative introduced a “Regularly Blocked” badge to alert users when a number from the designated series has been blocked by many individuals.
The unusually public criticism got here after Indian business day by day The Economic Times reported that TRAI had sought powers under India’s Information Technology Act to take motion against caller ID apps corresponding to Truecaller, Hiya, and Whoscall for labeling numbers from the designated 1400 and 1600 series as spam.
TRAI and India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which might consider any such proposal, didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.
The dispute comes at a pivotal time for Truecaller, whose core caller ID business has been facing growing regulatory and competitive pressures as the corporate expands into latest services and products. India stays its largest market by a large margin, with greater than 350 million of its 500 million monthly lively users based within the country, in keeping with the corporate.
Jhunjhunwala said Truecaller would share its data with the Indian IT ministry as a part of the regulatory process, arguing that any decision on caller ID apps must be evidence-based.
“Penalize the bad actors, not those like Truecaller that make a major positive impact,” he wrote.
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