The Indian government has directed telecom service providers (TSPs) in the country to mandatorily display callers' registered names along with their numbers for incoming calls starting November 1, 2026, in an effort to help people identify calls from unknown numbers and tackle spam or fraudulent calls.

To that end, the Department of Telecommunications has issued a circular urging service providers to implement the Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) service.

"At the time when a call is incoming, the calling name presentation service presents the calling name identity of the calling user on the user terminal of the called user," according to a circular issued by the Indian Ministry of Communications dated October 13, 2026.

"Calling name identity is the name of the calling user as recorded in subscriber data record of the originating telecommunication service provider and such identity is included in the calling line identification of such user."

The caller ID system is mainly targeted at wireless terrestrial networks established using 4G and higher generation technologies. The circular noted that a CNAP rollout for 2G and 3G networks, as well as public switched telephone networks (PSTNs), will be taken up separately after examination.

Under the new guidelines, every time a user receives a call, the first field will display the caller's number, as is the existing practice. The second field will contain the name of the calling user in the following order of preference -

To meet this requirement, every originating TSP is required to establish and maintain a database mapping subscribers' names to their numbers.

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