TRAI–RBI pilot to send SMS alerts to select users as India tests digital consent platform for promotional messages

Getting flooded with promotional calls and texts could soon become a lot easier to control. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) announced on Wednesday that SMS notifications will soon be sent to a limited set of mobile users as part of a pilot project to digitise and standardise customer consent for promotional communications. The initiative, if implemented, will be a major step toward modernising India’s consent framework and giving consumers control over how businesses and banks contact them.

The Digital Consent Acquisition (DCA) pilot brings together nine telecom operators and eleven major banks, including SBI, PNB, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Canara Bank, Bank of Maharashtra, IndusInd Bank, Indian Overseas Bank and Punjab & Sind Bank. These institutions have completed the required system integration and begun uploading sample sets of legacy customer consents onto a unified digital platform.

Under existing rules, customers can block unwanted promotional calls and SMSes by choosing categories to block, while also allowing specific businesses to contact them if they wish. The regulations require businesses to record consumer permissions in a Digital Consent Registry. 

However, because companies collected millions of consents in the past through paper forms or disparate digital systems, uploading and validating these records became impractical. As a result, legacy consents remained fragmented and opaque, leaving customers unable to view or revoke permissions they had given years earlier.

The new pilot aims to fix these gaps by creating a single digital interface where consumers can review, manage or withdraw consents at any time. The system also ensures that if a customer revokes consent, promotional communication from that business must stop.

As part of testing, customers whose old consents have been uploaded may receive SMS alerts from the short code 127000, sent by their telecom operator. Only a small, randomly selected subset of users will receive these messages, as the pilot is limited in scope and intended to validate system performance before a nationwide rollout. TRAI clarified that customers who do not receive any message need not worry.

Each SMS will include a secure link to the telecom operator’s authorised Consent Management Page, where users can view all consents recorded by the 11 participating banks for their mobile numbers. Customers may choose to continue, modify or revoke these consents, though taking action is completely optional. No personal or financial details will be requested, and TRAI has urged users to act only on messages received from the official 127000 code.

The pilot’s success is expected to pave the way for a full-scale deployment of India’s first unified digital consent platform, strengthening transparency and giving consumers stronger control over promotional communication in the years ahead.