Soon caller’s name to flash on phone screen as per KYC records with DoT

Very soon the caller’s name is going to flash on the screen whenever he or she calls. The department of telecommunications (DoT) will come out with a mechanism and the name would appear as per the know-your-customer (KYC) record of subscribers with the telecom operators.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) chairman PD Vaghela said that the department has received a reference to this effect from the DoT and that a consultation paper on this would be floated soon to seek stakeholders’ comments.

“We have just received a reference, and we will start work on this soon. Name as per KYC will appear when someone calls,” Vaghela said.

Effectively, subscribers will get to know the name of a caller even if it is not saved in their phone book. Currently, by using apps like Truecaller, some users can know the identity of such callers. The limitation with such apps is that the data is crowdsourced, so it may not be 100% authentic.

An added advantage of the mechanism would be that recipients will be able to avoid spam and unsolicited calls or report them to the authority for necessary action. So far, despite several measures, Trai has not been able to stop unsolicited commercial calls in an effective manner.

Since it is a matter related to policy, the final decision would be of the DoT and not Trai. The Trai consultation paper will highlight issues and invite comments from stakeholders and then have to send the recommendations to DoT.

The regulator will subsequently hold open house sessions in major cities, before finalising its recommendations.

The issue of privacy is likely to come up among concerns raised during this exercise. It is possible that some organisations may object to disclosing names without the subscribers’ consent.