Is AI Calling Legal in India? TRAI's 2026 Rules for Real Estate

Is AI calling legal in India? Yes. There is no ban on using AI to call people. But India's telecom regulator, TRAI, tightened the rules on commercial calls in 2024, 2025 and again in September 2026, and the 2026 amendment deals directly with calls placed by software or made with artificial voices, such as AI voices. On top of that, the DPDP Act governs what you do with the lead data you collect.

For a real-estate firm calling property leads, that comes down to a few practical rules. This guide explains them in plain English, with links to the official documents.

This is general information, not legal advice. Rules change, and how they apply depends on your setup. Confirm with your telecom provider and a lawyer before you start calling at scale.

Is AI calling legal in India? The short answer

You can use an AI calling agent to call property leads in India if you:

1. Declare it. Calls placed by software or made with artificial voices, such as AI voices, must be declared to your telecom provider in advance.
2. Call people who enquired, promptly. A written or online enquiry gives you a seven-day basis for contacting that person, if you keep a record of the enquiry.
3. Use the right number series for the type of call, and respect DND preferences and opt-outs.
4. Look after the data: use it for the purpose it was given, protect it, and delete it on request unless a law requires you to keep it.

The rest of this article explains each point.

What changed in 2026: AI calls are now "A2P calls"

TRAI's Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Third Amendment) Regulations, 2026, dated 18 September 2026, introduce a defined category called the Application-to-Person (A2P) call: a voice call initiated by an application, software system or automated platform without direct human dialling. TRAI's press release says this includes auto-dialled calls, robo-calls and pre-recorded or artificial-voice calls. An AI calling agent falls squarely inside it.

The key duty: every sender must declare its use of A2P calls to its telecom provider in advance. An A2P call made without that declaration is treated as unsolicited commercial communication, in other words, spam.

The amendment comes into force in stages after publication in the Official Gazette: most provisions after 30 days, some, including the A2P declaration, after 60 days, and a few, including the use of AI-flagged spam data in complaint handling, after 90 days. If you already place calls through any software or dialler, raise the declaration with your provider now.

The 7-day enquiry window

The same amendment changes what counts as a relationship with a customer. An enquiry about goods or services, made by the customer to the sender in writing or through digital means, allows commercial communication for seven days from the enquiry, as long as the sender keeps the enquiry in a verifiable form. An application for a product or service, a more formal step, allows three months.

For property leads, this means:

• A buyer who submits a 99acres, Magicbricks, Housing.com, Meta or website form about your project or listing has made a digital enquiry to you. Keep the record: the form, the timestamp and the source. Leads bought or shared from someone else's enquiry are less clear-cut.
• Call quickly. Contacting the buyer in the first days is good sales practice, as we explain in why the first 5 minutes matter, and it sits inside the enquiry window.
• After seven days, ongoing contact needs another basis, such as the buyer's consent, recorded in a way your telecom setup accepts. Ask for it while the conversation is warm, and plan follow-up accordingly. Our 21-day follow-up plan is built around this.
• Old lead lists (months old, never connected) are not covered by the enquiry window. Calling them is promotional calling with all its rules. See how to revive old leads responsibly.

Which number can you call from?

Three TRAI documents matter here:

• February 2025: TRAI's second amendment restricted senders from using normal 10-digit numbers for telemarketing, kept the 140 series for promotional calls and designated the new 1600 series for service and transactional calls.
• July 2026: in a clarification (Press Release 91/2026), TRAI restated that promotional calls by entities of any sector must use 140xx numbers, and that 1600xx numbers are for service and transactional calls by BFSI entities (regulated by RBI, SEBI, IRDAI and PFRDA) to their existing customers, and by government entities.
• September 2026: calls from the designated commercial and government number series (140xx, 1600xx and 1601xx) must not be blanket-blocked or tagged as suspected spam by call-identification apps; individual users can still block numbers themselves.

What this means in practice: if your calls promote projects, they are promotional calls and belong on the 140 series. Whether a particular call is promotional, service or transactional depends on its content; TRAI's rules say that if promotional content is mixed into a call, the whole call is treated as promotional. Ask your telecom provider to confirm the right series and registration for your calls in writing.

DND, consent and opt-outs

• Promotional calls reach only people who have not blocked that category in their DND preferences, unless the person has given explicit consent.
• Calling hours matter. Under TRAI's customer preference regulations, promotional calls are switched off by default between 9 pm and 10 am, unless the person has switched those hours on in their preferences. For an enquiry that arrives late at night, send a WhatsApp acknowledgement if the buyer opted in, and call when your calling window opens. Ask your telecom provider how your calls are classified. This is general information, not legal advice.
• Opt-outs must be honoured. When a buyer says "don't call me again", stop, and record it so no one on your team, human or AI, calls them again.
• Consent must be verifiable and registered. The 2026 amendment says older ("legacy") consents count only if they were obtained through verifiable means and are then registered in the Consent Register through your telecom provider. A note in a telecaller's diary will not do.

What happens if you get it wrong

TRAI's rules now come with fast enforcement:

• Customers can complain about spam within 7 days of receiving it, and providers must act on complaints about unregistered senders within 5 days (February 2025 amendment).
• A sender's first violation bars outgoing services on all its telecom resources for 15 days; repeat violations mean disconnection of all its telecom resources by all providers for one year, plus blacklisting (February 2025 amendment).
• Under the 2026 amendment, once fully in force, action can be triggered by 3 or more complaints from different people within 10 days if the sender's number is also flagged by the providers' AI-based spam detection.

For a real-estate office, losing every phone line for weeks is a far bigger cost than any fine.

The DPDP Act: what it means for your lead data

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 governs the personal data you collect: names, phone numbers, budgets, call recordings and transcripts. In plain terms:

• Purpose: you may use data for the purpose the buyer gave it to you, for example a property enquiry, unless they object, or with their consent for other purposes.
• Security: you must take reasonable security safeguards. Failing to do so carries the Act's highest penalty, up to ₹250 crore.
• Breaches: a personal data breach must be reported to the Data Protection Board and to the people affected.
• Erasure and rights: delete data when consent is withdrawn or the purpose is over, unless a law requires you to keep it, and respond to people's requests about their data. The 2025 Rules set a maximum of 90 days to respond.
• Timeline: the DPDP Rules were notified in November 2025 with an 18-month phased timeline, so most of these duties apply from around May 2027.

If you use an AI calling provider, the recordings and transcripts it creates are personal data too. Ask where they are stored, who can access them and how quickly they can be deleted.

A checklist for real-estate firms using AI calling

1. Your telecom provider has confirmed in writing that your A2P calls are declared.
2. You know which number series your calls go out on, and why.
3. Every lead has a stored enquiry record: source, form and timestamp.
4. New leads are called within the first days, inside the enquiry window.
5. Buyers are asked for consent to stay in touch, and the consent is recorded the way your telecom provider's consent system requires.
6. Opt-outs are recorded at once and respected across the team and the AI.
7. The AI says it is an AI when asked, and hands over to a person on request.
8. Lead data and recordings are access-controlled and deletable on request.

Questions to ask any AI calling provider

• Who declares the A2P calls to the telecom provider, and can I see the confirmation?
• Which number series will my calls use, and who owns that number?
• How are enquiry records, consent and opt-outs stored, and can I export them?
• Where are recordings and transcripts stored, who can access them, and how is data deleted?
• What does the agent say when a buyer asks "is this a bot?"

These questions protect you whichever provider you choose, including us. If you are comparing AI calling with your current telecallers, read our honest comparison of AI and human telecallers, and see how an AI calling agent for real estate handles the first call.

The bottom line

AI calling is legal in India, within these rules: declare software-placed calls, call people who enquired while the enquiry is fresh, use the right number series, honour DND and opt-outs, and treat lead data with care. Firms that build these habits now protect their phone lines, and their buyers' trust, as enforcement gets faster.

General information only, not legal advice. Based on the TRAI and Government of India documents linked below, as of October 2026.