Truecaller has launched a public fight with India’s telecom regulator over rules governing caller ID apps, saying India’s anti-spam framework is making it more difficult to protect consumers from unwanted calls in its biggest market.
On Wednesday, CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala (pictured above) publicly challenged the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), accusing the watchdog of preventing Truecaller from flagging community-reported spam information for calls from a series of country-only 1400 and 1600 numbers. It said the restrictions have led to abuse of the numbers and eroded trust in legitimate business calls.
The dispute stems from the framework of the Telecom Authority of India’s 2024 designation of the 1400 and 1600 number series for commercial communications, with businesses using the former for telemarketing calls and the latter for service and transaction-related calls. TRAI later mandated the migration to a dedicated numbering series, saying it would help consumers identify legitimate business communications and curb spam and scam calls.
The framework has been launched amid growing concerns over spam and scam calls in India, one of the world’s largest telecom markets, with regulators and telecom operators taking various measures to curb fraudulent communications. Last year, India’s Ministry of Telecommunications said authorities had blocked more than 2.1 million fraudulent mobile phone numbers and had taken action against more than 100,000 entities in the previous year, underscoring the scale of the problem.
Jhunjhunwala argued that the policy had unintended consequences. Citing internal company data, he said consumers are increasingly losing trust in their assigned number series, with Truecaller users ignoring 81% of calls in the 1400 series and 79% in the 1600 series over the past eight months. During the same period, users manually blocked 74 million calls from both number series, while daily blocking actions for 1600 series numbers have more than tripled since October 2025, he said.
Truecaller, unable to mark those numbers as spam, has instead introduced a “frequently blocked” badge to alert users when a number in a given series has been blocked by a large number of people.
The unusually public accusation came after Indian business daily The Economic Times reported that TRAI had sought permission under India’s Information Technology Act to take action against caller ID apps such as Truecaller, Hiya and Whoscall for labeling numbers of designated 1400 and 1600 series as spam.
TRAI and India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which would consider such proposals, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The dispute comes at a pivotal time for Truecaller, whose core caller ID business is facing growing regulatory and competitive pressures as the company expands into new products and services. According to the company, India remains its largest market with more than 350 million of its 500 million monthly active users based in the country.
Jhunjhunwala said Truecaller would share data with the Indian IT ministry as part of the regulatory process and asserted that any decision on the caller ID app should be based on evidence.
“Punish bad actors, not people like Truecaller who have a huge positive impact,” he wrote.
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