Let every Indian have a Praja Doot

 To: 

Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw, 

Hon'ble Union Minister of Electronics & Information Technology, Railways, and Information & Broadcasting 

Subject: 

Spam is carpet bombing. Let every Indian have a Praja Doot to guard the gate

==================================================

Respected Vaishnawji,

Yesterday's TRAI figures for July to September 2026 read like a war report.

In just one quarter, TRAI's AI systems flagged 19.9 billion suspected spam

calls and SMS (18.28 billion calls and 1.62 billion messages). That is more than

21 crore attempts every single day. Citizens filed 15.29 lakh complaints, and

Vodafone Idea topped the list with 5.39 lakh. TRAI barred 1,10,325 numbers for

15 days, including 47,249 on Vodafone Idea, disconnected 13,777 repeat

offenders for a year, and blacklisted 374 senders.

These are serious efforts, and TRAI deserves credit for them. But the picture that

comes to my mind is the carpet bombing of the Second World War. Thousands of

bombers fly over a city, and the defenders shoot down a few hundred. The city

still burns.

Barring 47,000 numbers removes a few bombers after they have already struck.

Spam works because it costs the sender almost nothing, and the entire cost of

the annoyance, the lost time and the fraud falls on the person who receives it. As

long as that equation holds, a new number will replace every barred one by the

next morning.

A different defence : a Praja Doot for every Indian

Today the telco and the regulator stand between the advertiser and the citizen,

and they are always one step behind. I suggest we move the gate to where it

belongs: with the citizen.

IImagine every Indian having a personal AI agent, a Praja Doot (people's

messenger), that answers on their behalf. 

Every brand, bank, builder or insurer would have its own agent, a Raja Doot.

Nothing reaches the citizen unless the two Doots have first negotiated it:

• The Raja Doot states what it is offering, why it is relevant, and what it
• 
  
• will give in return (a discount, cashback, or even a small payment for the
• 
  
• citizen's attention).

• The Praja Doot checks this against the citizen's own rules. For example, no
• 
  
• loan offers ever, property offers only after 6 PM on weekends, health
• 
  
• insurance only from my existing insurer, and none of my personal data shared
• 
  
• without asking me.

• If the terms fit, the message is delivered. If they do not, it is politely refused,
• 
  
• and the citizen never even hears the phone ring.
• 
  

Carpet bombing then turns into something closer to a market. Advertisers stop

paying for volume and start paying for consent. The citizen is no longer a target.

The citizen becomes a party to a deal.

No app to download, no smartphone needed

This must not become one more app that only the young and the urban can use. 

A Praja Doot would not live on the citizen's phone. It would live in the network, 

run by the citizen's telecom operator or on a public DPI platform, and it would

sit on every incoming call and SMS before the phone even rings.

So it would protect a ₹1,000 feature phone exactly as well as a costly smartphone.

Setting it up would follow, more or less, the same steps by which our social benefit

schemes already reach crores of families through Direct Benefit Transfer:

1. Enrol once. 
2. 
   
3. The mobile number is already linked to the citizen's identity through the
4. 
   
5. telco's KYC, so the Praja Doot is switched on for that number, just as a bank
6. 
   
7. account is seeded with Aadhaar to receive DBT.
8. 
   
9. 
   
10. Tell it your wishes, in your own language. 
11. 
    
12. The citizen dials a toll-free number (or the existing 1909), sends an SMS,
13. 
    
14. uses USSD, or chats on WhatsApp, and simply speaks in Hindi, Tamil,
15. 
    
16. Odia or any other language :
17. 
    
18. 
    
19. " No loan calls. Property offers only on Sundays. Nothing from gaming apps "
20. 
    
21. 
    
22. Bhashini turns this into rules for the agent. 
23. 
    
24. A Common Service Centre, a post office or the telco's own store can help
25. 
    
26. those who want a human hand.
27. 
    
28. 
    
29. 
    
30. Consent is recorded, not assumed. 
31. 
    
32. Like the consent screen in DBT and Account Aggregator flows, every rule the
33. 
    
34. citizen sets is recorded, can be seen at any time, and can be changed with
35. 
    
36. one call or SMS.
37. 
    
38. 
    
39. Delivery only to the verified. 
40. 
    
41. Just as benefits reach only a verified, seeded account and not a middleman,
42. 
    
43. offers reach the citizen only from a verified Raja Doot that has agreed to the
44. 
    
45. citizen's terms. Everything else is stopped at the network.
46. 
    
47. 
    
48. A grievance line. 
49. 
    
50. If anything slips through, one call or SMS to report it penalises the sender's
51. 
    
52. Raja Doot automatically, much as the DND complaint system works today, but
53. 
    
54. with real teeth.
55. 
    

For the 112 crore subscribers who have never filled in a DND form, the default

could be a sensible, protective rule set that is switched on automatically. The

citizen does nothing, and is protected anyway.

See it working

To make the idea concrete, I have prepared a clickable mockup of this whole

agentic workflow on an ordinary feature phone. It shows switching on with

*1909#, speaking the rules in Hindi, five Raja Doots negotiating with one Praja

Doot, the offer that finally reaches the phone, the consent ledger, and a one-key

spam complaint:

Praja Doot: a clickable walkthrough

What it would take

India is better placed than any country in the world to build this, because we

already have the Digital Public Infrastructure on which it can stand.

1. Verified identity for every Raja Doot. 

2. 
   

3. 
   

4. Only agents of businesses verified through the existing DLT registration, GST,

5. 
   

6. or a DigiLocker or UPI-style credential would be allowed to negotiate. 

7. 
   

8. An anonymous spammer would not even get a seat at the table. 

9. 
   

10. TRAI has already put 34,025 senders through e-KYC this quarter, so

11. 
    

12. the beginning is there.

13. 
    

14. 
    

1. A machine-readable consent protocol. 

2. 
   

3. Only 22.4 crore of our 134.9 crore subscribers, about 17 percent, have

4. 
   

5. registered any preference on the DND registry. The other 112 crore have not,

6. 
   

7. not because they welcome spam, but because a form with a few checkboxes

8. 
   

9. is too blunt a tool. The DND registry and the DLT consent framework could

10. 
    

11. grow into an open protocol, much like UPI did for payments, through which

12. 
    

13. Praja Doots and Raja Doots talk to each other in a standard language. 

14. 
    

15. MeitY, TRAI and DoT could develop it jointly under the IndiaAI Mission.

16. 
    

17. Loyalty of the Praja Doot to the citizen. 

18. 
    

19. This is the most important condition of all. A Praja Doot built by a platform

20. could quietly serve the platform and sell the citizen's attention to the highest

21. bidder. The law must say clearly that a Praja Doot owes its duty to the  

22. citizen alone, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act gives us a natural

23. place to say it, perhaps by recognizing such agents as a kind of :

24. "Consent Manager", acting for the Data Principal .

25. 
    

26. 
    

27. Indian languages from day one, 

28. through Bhashini, so that a farmer in Odisha can tell her Praja Doot in Odia

29. what she does and does not want to hear about.

Why this is also a privacy issue

I have been writing about privacy on my blog for many years. Back in 2018, in

"Parekh's Law of Privacy,"  I wrote that "concern for privacy increases in direct

proportion to the amount of personal information which a person wants to hide

from the public."

Spam is the other side of that coin. Every unwanted call is proof that someone has

our number, our name, and often our loan history or our property search, without

our consent. A Praja Doot would reverse that flow. Instead of brands holding

data about us, our own agent would hold our preferences for us and

reveal only what we choose, only to whom we choose and only in exchange for

something we value

Dear Shri Vaishnawji, 

With UPI, Aadhaar and DigiLocker, India has already shown the world that public

digital rails can serve 140 crore people. 

Let us now build the rails on which every Indian can say "yes" to the  

offers they want and a quiet, firm "no" to everything else.

Let us end the carpet bombing not with more anti-aircraft guns, but by giving

every citizen the power to decide who may fly over their home.

With regards,

Hemen Parekh 

www.Iam-Immortal.ai  /  www.IndiaAGI.ai  /  www.YourContentCreator.in

Sources

• Moneycontrol, "Vodafone Idea leads telcos in spam complaints, bars over 47,000 numbers for violations: TRAI" (13 November 2026): https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/telecom/vodafone-idea-leads-telcos-in-spam-complaints-bars-over-47-000-numbers-for-violations-trai-14079549.html
• 
  
• Indian Television, "TRAI flags 18.28 billion suspected spam calls using AI in Q2" (13 November 2026): https://indiantelevision.com/regulators/trai-flags-18-28-billion-suspected-spam-calls-using-ai-in-q2/

References from my blog

• Parekh's Law of Privacy (April 2018):
• 
  
• http://myblogepage.blogspot.com/2018/04/parekhs-law-of-privacy.html