Cellphone users in India hope to begin 2011 on a happy note, no longer bugged by random calls and text messages every hour of the day pushing products and services they have little need for. Such as the company that sends out an SMS at 1.30 in the morning asking: “Are bedbugs keeping you awake all night?” Come January 1, when the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations 2010 come into effect, telemarketers will no longer be able to pester you with messages between 9 pm and 9 am — bringing relief to both mobile and landline subscribers. Trai, the national telecom regulator, has been making valiant efforts since 2007 to rein in pesky calls and text messages, but with limited success. While it is undeniable that these are much less now than, say, a year ago, the menace continues. That is why when the government had imposed a temporary blanket ban on bulk SMSes in the days preceding the Allahabad high court verdict in the Ayodhya title suit, the relief was so palpable. That crisis over, things were swiftly back at square one. Telemarketers love the economics of it: sending out bulk text in lakhs at a time is so cheap that they prefer it to any other medium — which is why you get bombarded with SMSes promoting everything from cheap holidays and airfares, weight-loss treatments, food festivals at restaurants to loans and insurance policies at attractive rates. Politicians too have now got into the act — and are using bulk texts to communicate with their constituents.
These unwanted calls and messages are as irritating as Internet spam messages. Internet service providers and popular email sites like MSN/Hotmail, Google and Yahoo have to a large extent successfully blocked spam, ensuring that these mostly go into “junk” folders so that users don’t have to wade through hundreds of unwanted emails to find those specifically intended for them. It is to be hoped that Trai’s new regulations, which are all encompassing and detailed, will similarly act as a filter so that cellphone users are freed from daily bombardment of unwanted messages. From January 1, subscribers will be able to set their own filter level — from fully blocked to partially blocked, choosing from seven categories. Subscribers can thus choose an option so that he or she does not miss anything of importance to them — the categories include banking/insurance/ financial products/credit cards; real estate; education; health; consumer goods and automobiles; communication/broadcasting/entertainment/IT and tourism and leisure.
Trai’s measures should work to a large extent, but a lot also depends on the consumer. It has been suggested that Trai could hire up to 50-100 professionals in each telecom circle to follow up on complaints and chase agents making the calls and promoting products. As an incentive, Trai could share the revenue it collects as penalties from errant telemarketing entities. It could also share this revenue with service providers. If the telemarketing companies are brazen enough to carry on business as usual, Trai can collect quite a hefty amount as the penalty ranges from `25,000 for a first offence to `2,50,00 for the sixth one. In addition, after the sixth offence, the telemarketer will get blacklisted. Service providers will have to cut off their line for two years. Trai will need to keep some innovative ideas up its sleeve as the ingenuity of telemarketers is unbounded. As seen since 2007, they are quite adept at staying one step ahead of the law. But Trai’s success also depends on consumers being proactive: if a cellphone user is too lazy to act to block unwanted messages, then he or she has no one else to blame and should not grumble!