India’s telecom regulator on Monday expanded the 1600-number series beyond banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) to utilities, courier and logistics service providers, which will use the 1601 series, as a means to prevent fraud and impersonation incidents and make it easier for consumers to recognise legitimate calls.
Under Phase 1 of the expansion plan, the 1601 series will be issued to electricity distribution companies, water utilities, city gas distribution companies, LPG distribution entities and other utility service providers. Courier companies, express logistics companies, parcel delivery service providers, freight and logistics service providers engaged in delivery of consignments will also be able to use the 1601 series.
Telcos will issue the numbers over 90 days, after verifying the eligibility of the entity and ensuring that the 1601-series numbers will be used exclusively for transactional and service calls, strictly prohibiting promotional voice calls. The number series will not be issued to intermediaries or aggregators that provide a platform for these services.
“Considering the critical and sensitive nature of communications made by the entities in BFSI sector and government, this separate series has been issued for the sectors other than BFSI and Government in order to avoid mixing of important financial voice calls with the service and transactional calls from the other sectors,” the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said in a statement on Monday. The regulator did not specify which services were likely to be covered in future phases.
The adoption is expected to become an important tool in combating impersonation by fraudsters who use normal 10-digit numbers and falsely claim to represent legitimate businesses. According to a recent TRAI report, as many as 1.15 billion calls originated from dedicated 1600-series numbers during Q1 FY2026-27.
TRAI had mandated the use of 1600-series numbers for transaction and service-related calls from the banking, financial services and insurance sector and even government-to-citizen communication. The regulator brought in these series earlier this year. It recently cautioned call management apps and users that the 1600 number should not be tagged or flagged as possible spam, following a run-in with Truecaller, which had flagged that numbers from the 1600 series and another 140 series, meant only for promotional calls, often carried frequently blocked tags on its platform that were community-generated. TRAI had argued that the 1600 number series was used for service and transaction calls by regulated entities of the BFSI sector, including entities regulated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irdai) and Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA), to their existing customers and by government entities for government-to-citizen communication.
The clarification comes on the back of banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) entities seeking TRAI’s intervention to ensure that calls they make to customers do not get blocked by platforms.
