Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has introduced a new numbering series, 160xxxxxxx for making service/transactional calls. This initiative is a step towards providing citizens with a way to easily identify such legitimate calls.
Currently 140xxxxxxx series has been allocated to telemarketers for making promotional/service/transactional voice calls. As 140xx series is being used extensively for promotional calls, consumers normally do not respond to such calls and many important service/transactional calls are missed. This has resulted in wide use of regular 10-digit numbers by genuine entities for making service/transactional calls. This also gave opportunity to fraudsters to deceive consumers using 10-digit numbers.
Hence, in order to create confidence among the consumers and to enable them to distinguish between the spam calls originating from 10-digit unknown numbers and the genuine service/transactional calls from genuine Principle Entities, there was a need of separate number series to cater service/transactional voice calls. To fulfil this need, the DoT has allocated a new numbering series, i.e., 160xxxxxxx which will exclusively be used for service/transactional voice calls by the Principle Entities.
