TRAI Regulations –  Sending SMS in India

THIS IS ONLY VALID FOR SMS SENT TO INDIAN DESTINATION NUMBERS (NOT APPLICABLE FOR ILDO / INTERNATIONAL ROUTE)

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is constantly looking for ways to improve end-user experience and eliminate spam and fraudulent commercial communication (2018 Regulation). With this TRAI regulation implementation and it is mandated for Indian businesses to use SMS to register Entities, SenderIDs, SMS templates in a centralized DLT portal from operators.

 
UPDATES

• The deadline to ensure existing Entities registered their information on DLT platforms of operators was 31st May 2020. Any company which does not have the Entity registration and Sender ID approved by the operators, SMS will not process and it will fail to deliver in India.
• All Indian domestic commercial SMS (Transactional & Promotional) will be charged an additional DLT scrubbing charge of Rs. 0.025 per SMS unit* by the operator for each submission from 1st September 2020. This charge will be applicable in addition to the SMS rate according to your bill plan. 
• Operators have stopped sending Delivery Reports (DLRs) for Promotional SMSs (SMS sent with numeric sender ID) in alignment with TRAI regulation from 7th October 2020. Exotel will mark such SMS based on successful submission to operators i.e. ‘Status’ will be ‘sent’ and ‘DetailedStatus’ will be ‘DELIVERED_TO_OPERATOR’. 
• Template registration (Learn more) is planned to be live on April 1, 2021, and we highly advise you to be compliant at the earliest to avoid SMS failures. Below are the dates for the next set of deadlines:
  • All the OTP templates explicitly (Transaction and Service-related) that have been registered so far, should be updated with ‘Brand Name(s)’ by October 31, 2020.
  • Every Content Template that is being registered by a Principal Entity should contain ‘Brand Name(s)’ (Complete business name/brand name/trademark) in the content field. New templates registering from October 11, 2020, onwards should be added with ‘Brand Name(s)’ and could be rejected if the same is not incorporated while registering.
  • Content Templates for OTP without ‘Brand Name(s)’ will be considered invalid after October 31, 2020.
  • Principal Entity ID is mandatory to be provided along with Header (Sender ID) and Content effective November 19, 2020. You can set it on Exotel Dashboard (Settings -> SMS DLT Settings) or provide ‘DltEntityId’ in the Send SMS API request (Learn More)
  • DLT Template ID enforcement go-live date is April 1, 2021.