Image for representational purposes only. | Photo credit: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury
As many as 1.7 crore telecom connections have been disconnected in the last four years till date as a result of information obtained from the Sanchar Saathi portal set up by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) last year, as well as information provided by the Union Home Ministry, law enforcement agencies and the Recognition System face called ASTR to deduplicate SIM card registrations of the same person.
The Department of Defense announced the statistics on the sidelines of an event it hosted on Friday to mark World Telecommunications and Information Society Day. The Sanchar Saathi portal has been created for users to report ‘imitation’ mobile calls such as call center scams.
A senior official said that the problem of unwanted commercial calls due to spam was well addressed in the past through the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) ‘Do Not Disturb’ (DND) registry where users could opt out of receiving commercial messages via SMS and telephone. is calling. However, much of this activity has moved “from the network layer to the service layer,” the official said, explaining that they had moved away from using regulated telecommunications networks with mandatory spam call filters to using third-party services such as WhatsApp to reach targets.
In statistics shared with the media, the Department of Defense said that more than six million disconnected phone numbers were also removed from WhatsApp as part of the standard operating procedure (SOP) between the government and the Meta, Inc.-owned messaging platform. Additionally, banks and mobile wallet providers have disconnected nearly 10 lakh accounts linked to imitation numbers.
Statistics show that WhatsApp accounts registered using the Pakistani ISD code +92 were also targeted. 577 numbers were removed from the platform for imitating government officials.
CNAP pilot
The government may also embark on a caller name presentation pilot project (CNAP), which is a controversial plan to display the registered names of all incoming callers along with their telephone number. Civil society and telecommunications groups warn that such a proposal could have unintended consequences, such as people being reluctant to reveal their caste name to others.
