Truecaller CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala. File
| Photo Credit: The Hindu
Caller ID firm Truecaller hit out on Wednesday (July 8, 2026) against the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) for reportedly trying to bring it under regulation. The move comes months into TRAI’s mandate that promotional and banking calls respectively use 140- and 160-series numbers, and that apps like Truecaller whitelist those numbers from spam warnings. While Truecaller was doubtful of TRAI’s authority to order apps — as opposed to telcos — to whitelist such numbers, it deferred to the instructions. Now, the company says, the whitelisting has led to a “significant” increase in spam calls. Truecaller CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala said on X, formerly Twitter, that “[o]ver 51 million calls from both series go unanswered every single day,” and that “[t]his happened in front of our eyes and we are mandated not to tell our users that those calls are spam.”As the number of such calls blocked by Truecaller users mounted to over 1 lakh a day, Mr. Jhunjhunwala said, “We said enough is enough,” and “built the ‘Frequently Blocked’ badge,” which was displayed even on whitelisted numbers. Banks have been using the series, sanctioned by TRAI earlier this month, to reach out to customers with loan, credit and other offers. Mr. Jhunjhunwala’s riposte on X came a day after a financial daily reported that TRAI took exception to the labelling of calls from this series and had written to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) seeking the authority to regulate caller ID apps. MeitY, whose remit includes regulation of online services, did not respond to a request for comment, and neither did TRAI.App regulationMultiple ministries within the government have gradually asserted themselves into private platforms’ platform design over the last few months. Last year, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), which regulates telecom operators and internet providers, issued directions to WhatsApp that would require the messaging app to only work if the registered SIM card was currently inside the phone of a user.MeitY, on the other hand, has also taken issue with WhatsApp’s username feature, which would allow people to contact others and be contacted without revealing their phone numbers, and has asked the firm to pause the feature. TRAI’s discussions with Truecaller preceded both moves, in which it told the firms to whitelist 140- and 160-series calls.The regulator made a provision for the two series last year with the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Second Amendment) Regulations, 2025, last February. Those amendments, TRAI said, were aimed at “tightening the threshold norms for action against [unsolicited commercial communications], bringing in higher accountability of senders and telemarketers, curbing the misuse of 10-digit numbers for telemarketing, implementing stricter measures against unregistered telemarketers.”TRAI’s attempt to regulate apps like Truecaller “makes absolutely no sense,” Mr. Jhunjhunwala said on Wednesday. “We are the good actors who are helping hundreds of millions of Indians every day, including the vulnerable elderly, to have a trusted communication experience. Instead, they want to enable bad actors and give them an open playground to spam and scam us by censoring community information.” Published - July 08, 2026 04:34 pm IST
