Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal writes to Jio, Vi, BSNL CEOs, urges them to tackle spam calls jointly

Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal has written letters to heads of all the major telecom operators in the country. In his letter to the CEOs of Vodafone Idea (Vi), Reliance Jio, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Tata Teleservices, Vittal has urged these leaders to take a unified approach at tackling the issue of spam calls in the country.

In his letters to Reliance Jio MD Pankaj Panwar, Vodafone Idea CEO Akshaya Moondra, Tata Teleservices MD Harijit Singh Chauhan and BSNL CMD Robert Ravi, Vittal said that Airtel was ready to take the first step in this direction. He recommended sharing data, which includes the name of the enterprise and its active numbers, on a monthly basis as a way to filter out the entities that were making spam calls to the customers.

"We strongly believe that tackling this issue should be a joint endeavour among all telecom operators, rather than isolated efforts," Vittal wrote in his letter while stressing on the need for a join action to tackle the issue of spam calls. He also said that it was the 'collective responsibility' of the telecom operators in the country to prevent Unsolicited Commercial Calls or UCC by ensuring that their networks were not being leveraged by spammers.

TRAI on spam calls

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is taking active measures to prevent the issue of spam calls in the country. The organisation offers an app on the Google Play Store, the TRAI DND app, to help users file complaints against numbers and entities making spam calls. Additionally, it has directed the telecom operators in the country to cease all voice-based promotional calls originating from telemarketers or unregistered senders.

Notably, TRAI, in its report earlier this month said that telecom operators in the country had collectively blacklisted 50 entities and disconnected more than 2.75 lakh mobile numbers that were making spam calls to the customers.