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TRAI to levy 5 paisa for commercial SMSs

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW DELHI, INDIA: In order to further deter sending of promotional SMSs, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has prescribed ‘a promotional SMS charge’ of Re. 0.05 (five paisa only) payable by an Originating Access Provider to the Terminating Access Provider for each promotional SMS sent by a registered telemarketer from the network of the Originating Access Provider to the network of the Terminating Access Provider.

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TRAI issued this mandate in its “The Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Seventh Amendment) Regulations, 2011”.

To further streamline the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, the authority has also allowed transactional message sending entities to send transactional messages without registering as telemarketer with TRAI.

The authority has also mandated that these entities will have to enter into a standard agreement with their access providers for obtaining any telecom resources and has exempted the transactional message sending entities from the limit of 100 SMS per day per SIM.

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Further to strengthen the registering and redressal of the complaints, the authority has allowed the consumers to add a brief description of UCC in the SMS format already prescribed for registering such complaints.

In the direction also issued today, the authority has included the following categories of SMSs in the definition of transactional message:-

(i) Information sent by e-commerce agencies in response to ecommerce transactions made by their customers;

(ii) information sent by a company or a firm or depository participant registered with Securities and Exchange board of India (SEBI) or Insurance Regulatory Development Authority (IRDA) or Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI) or National Commodity & Derivative Exchange Ltd. (NCDEX) or Multi Commodity Exchange of India Ltd. (MCX) to its clients pertaining to the account of the client;

(iii) Information sent by a registered company to its employees or agents or to its customers pertaining to services or goods to be delivered to such customers.

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