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About 850 million mobile customers thought September 27, 2011 would be their D-day to get rid of pesky SMSes. For, that was the day when the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) finally came out with its revised set of rules barring unsolicited calls and SMSes. But even after four months, there seems to be little let-up from nuisance calls and messages for most mobile users in the country.

As per TRAI data, an urban mobile user receives approximately four marketing or promotional messages in a day on his device. And to curb these, the regulatory body came up with its exercise of do not disturb (DND) registry, later renamed as national customer preference register (NCPR), where a customer can register to avoid being harassed by telemarketers.

Though telecom operators have also started penalising telemarketing firms for violating guidelines, they blame the government for improper implementation of the registry.

“There are good security systems in place with us but the DND registry till date has not been successfully implemented leading to pesky SMSes,” says a spokesperson of Vodafone. “More messages are generated from abroad which is causing confusion and results in loss for operators,” he claims.

Despite new regulations to penalise violators up to Rs.2.5 lakh, there is little control over bulk SMSes from abroad through the web, says an Aircel official.Acknowledging this fact, even telecom minister Kapil Sibal, at a recent meeting, said the government had no control over SMSes coming via the Internet as the servers were situated abroad.

However, taking cognisance of the situation, TRAI, in its latest fiat on January 20, 2012, has come out with a new set of instructions to all access providers and the international long-distance operators that bars delivery of SMSes with alphanumeric headers, SMS with similar signatures, etc. “We hope this would strengthen the framework for addressing unsolicited commercial communications,” said a TRAI official.

-dc chn