India to introduce new Truecaller-like caller ID in coming weeks

In the coming three weeks, there will be no more 'unknown' callers that will display on your phone as the Indian government is all set to roll out its own Truecaller-like app that will not only enable the users to see the name of the caller but also help users.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is working on a new feature that is reportedly going to be a robust form of caller identification that will be based on the user's KYC.

In an interview with the Hindustan Times, P.D. Vaghela, chairperson of Trai on Wednesday, said that Trai has conducted several stakeholder consultations to iron out the issues.

“The new feature should be rolled out in the next two to three weeks," he added

Truecaller is a Swedish company that has features of caller-identification, call-blocking, flash-messaging, call-recording, Chat & Voice by using the Internet. It requires users to provide a standard cellular mobile number for registering with the service. The app is available for Android and iOS.

It was in September when TRAI secretary V Ranghunandan told Business Today, "We have this reference from the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) to have new mechanism that will show the KYC-based names on users' phone displays, whenever they receive a call. We are discussing with service providers, and we are working on this...We need to continuously track spam calls in India."