Finding Caller’s Name Will Be Possible In India Even Without Truecaller: Here’s How

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is planning to help you deal with spam calls through a new caller ID feature. Although Truecaller already supports this, the name may not be the same as that of the caller’s Know Your Customer (KYC) documents. DoT’s new initiative could ensure that the true identity of the caller is known to you.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) chairman PD Vaghela told The Financial Express, “We have just received a reference, and we will start work on this soon. Name as per KYC will appear when someone calls”. Vaghela added that a consultation paper regarding this initiative will be passed on to the stakeholders for feedback.

The TRAI chairman said that the proposed mechanism will display the caller’s name on the screen. The name will be as per the caller’s KYC information that is available with telecom companies. This means that the call recipients will be able to view the caller’s name even if their number isn’t saved on their phone. Truecaller already has this functionality, but it’s likely that all the names on the app may not be fully correct, since the data is crowdsourced.

Although TRAI has been trying to crack down on spam calls for a while, its efforts have mostly been futile. With the caller ID feature, users will be able to identify unsolicited calls and block and report them. After discussing with stakeholders, TRAI will be passing on the recommendations to DoT, which will take the final call on the issue.

Stakeholders could likely raise concerns over privacy, since customers would not want details such as names from their KYC documents to be made public. The report noted that officials assured that it will find ways to protect user data.