TRAI sets February 15 deadline for adoption of 1600 series by IRDAI regulated entities for service calls

TRAI said the directive has been issued with an aim to boost consumer confidence, curb spam and prevent fraudulent activities through voice calls. | Photo credit: Dado Ruvic

TRAI said the directive has been issued with an aim to boost consumer confidence, curb spam and prevent fraudulent activities through voice calls. The series will enable people to reliably identify legitimate calls coming from such regulated entities.

“TRAI has issued an instruction on December 16, 2025, directing that the IRDAI regulated entities should adopt ‘1600’ serial numbers for making service and transactional calls to the consumers before the last date of February 15, 2026,” TRAI said in a statement.

The mandate for the last date has been issued in consultation with IRDAI. It added that TRAI had earlier issued similar instructions for mandatory adoption of 1600 serial numbers by entities regulated by RBI, SEBI and PFRDA.

“In response to TRAI’s regulatory initiative, the ‘1600’ number range has been designated by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) for assignment to banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector entities and government organizations to clearly distinguish their services and transactional calls from other commercial communications,” the statement said.

TRAI said it has been in regular touch with telecom providers and the BFSI regulators for adoption of 1600 series by industry entities and around 570 entities have already adopted 1600 serial numbers, subscribing to a total of over 3,000 numbers.

Based on TRAI’s interactions with stakeholders, it was assessed that the time is now ripe to make time-bound completion of the exercise mandatory so that entities that continue to use standard 10-digit numbers for service and transactional calls also switch to 1600 series numbers to reduce the risk of fraudulent or misleading calls being made in the guise of trusted financial institutions.

TRAI has received inputs regarding the timelines from IRDAI, following deliberations at the Joint Committee of Regulators (JCoR) meetings. It added that based on the consultations held, an implementation schedule has now been issued.

“The structured and time-bound adoption of the 1600 Series will significantly improve consumer security and help reduce impersonation-based financial fraud committed through telephone calls,” the report said.

Published on December 18, 2025