Following new fiat, aviation and tech firms could approach DoT for service call numbers

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Following the directive by the Department of Telecom reserving numbers beginning with 160 for making transactional and service calls, tech majors such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta besides airlines such as Air India and Indigo could soon apply for allocation of numbers, The Economic Times has reported after speaking to communications executives. “Our primary goal is to allocate transactional series numbers to regulated financial institutions such as banks, insurance companies, payment services as well as public service government bodies such as UIDAI (for Aadhar authentication), and other social benefit schemes,” a bureaucrat involved in the process told the newspaper.

“This is from the perspective of customer protection to reduce frauds as well as for senders to conclude critical transactions without failures. But any other organisation which is facing problems of call failures for service use cases also have a provision to apply and seek approval from the telecom regulator,” the official elucidated.

The DoT’s efforts to segregate transactional and service calls and lend them quick recognition through unique number series is part of the government’s bigger war against pesky and fraudulent calls. The number of organisations that now requires to address customers directly is growing fast with the proliferation of ride-hailing, food-tech, quick commerce businesses rising fast. Therefore, these companies need to have a separate set of numbers that will allow them to call customers with the person at the other end of the call quickly understanding the category of the caller.

The DoT has said that central and state government entities would use 10-digit telephone numbers in the format of 1600ABCXXX. Those financial firms and bodies that are regulated by RBI, SEBI, IRDAI and PFRDA would use numbers in the format 1601ABCXXX. The DoT notification also said that other businesses have to apply to Trai for allocation of numbers.

“As per Trai norms, enterprise calls originating from foreign servers cannot seek Indian numbers from DoT provisioned series. Either, they have to demonstrate that those calls originate and travel through Indian networks or they can also seek virtual numbers from licensed MVNO operators for cloud telephony,” Aniketh Jain, founder of customer communications startup Fyno told the newspaper.

The DoT communication was dated May 28. Earlier, only 140 number series were used for all kinds of commercial purposes. The DoT has now segregated the calls into two categories – those numbers beginning with 140 would be used for marketing and those beginning with 160 will be used for making service calls.

The categorisation would help banks and NBFCs to alert customers on sundry items such as credit card payment reminders. Earlier, most subscribers had stopped responding to transactional calls thinking numbers beginning with 140 could be spam.

Experts are of the opinion that the new system of 160 and 161 series would go a long way in ensuring that subscribers do not fall prey to fraudsters dialing from personal SIMs to swindle recipients. Their favourite ploy is to make potential victims believe that they were genuine bank representatives.