29 May 2024
All state and central government companies will use phone numbers beginning with 1600. All financial entities failing under RBI, SEBI, PFRDA, and IRDAI will use the 1601 series.
The Telecom department announced on Tuesday its plans to roll out 10-digit numbers beginning with 1600 for service and 1400 series for marketing calls, as per Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulation (TCCCPR) 2018. The phone numbers will use the 1600ABCXXX format, where AB denotes the telecom circle, like 11 for NCR and 22 for Mumbai, C indicates the telecom operator, and XXX will display numbers between 000 and 999.
TRAI recently recommended that mobile phone makers enable the display of the caller’s name for both personal and commercial calls.
This distinction will ensure callers know a genuine caller, like a financial institution, from a fraudster using a personal SIM card acting like a bank representative. Some telecom operators have started using the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), a blockchain-based solution to target fraud calls and text messages.
The Telecom Service Provider will properly verify before allocating these numbers to a company.