The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has proposed new guidelines to restrict unsolicited telemarketing calls. The new guidelines would ban banks from using the services of direct sales agents to make telemarketing calls for selling financial business plans.

According to TRAI data, the Banking industry is responsible for about 90 per cent of all unsolicited calls making to mobile customers by more than 30,000 direct sales agents working for the banks. The most interesting thing is that these direct sales agents are not covered by any rules and regulations and they don’t have any licence from any government authority.

The TRAI is likely to propose the new guidelines in this week that would be obligatory for all the banks to use the services of licensed OSPs, who work under the guidelines formulated by the department of telecommunications (DoT).

TRAI is trying to visualize for maintaining a central do-not call (DNC) list by National Informatics Centre (NIC) on a national level. Customers will have to register their names in the national DNC list to keep themselves away from unwanted calls.

The OSPs would not be able to make telemarketing calls to the person who is registered in the DNC list. In case of an OSP making calls to people who have registered their names in the DNC list, the OSP would be penalized.

Violators OSPs in countries such as US, UK and Australia, pay huge fines for nat maintaining DNC list.

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