Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued an order to all Telecom Service Providers (TSP) instructing them to upload data of every permanently disabled number so that those mobile numbers who are surrendered or permanently disabled and re-allotted to another person can be de-registered by third parties such as banks, government organisations, etc.
TRAI told telecom operators to upload the Mobile Number Revocation List (MNRL) every month starting from November itself on the website of TRAI. The regulator ordered operators to upload the list of permanently disconnected numbers for the month of November by 7 December on the basis of which, the MNRL will get auto-published on 8th December 2019 and be available on the authority’s website for a period of one month.
MNRL data for each month will be archived for future audit or verification purposes and will be retained in the database for a period of 12 months. Information Technology (IT) division of the authority will be the nodal division on behalf of the authority for maintaining the website.
Most of the public and private services use mobile numbers for verification, authentication and authorization through OTPs but when a number of any person is permanently disabled, it gets re-allotted to someone else after a certain period of time. This creates a huge potential of an identity/profile takes over. With this order, third parties will be able to identify and remove such numbers from there databases hence limiting any misuse.
