DLT registration (India SMS)

India's mandatory registration of businesses, sender IDs, message templates and consent on telecom operators' DLT platforms.

In India, commercial SMS is regulated through DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) platforms run by the telecom operators, under rules from the telecom regulator. Before sending, a business registers itself as a principal entity, registers its sender IDs (called headers), and registers the exact templates it will send, each in a category such as transactional, service or promotional.

Every message is checked against these registrations. A message whose sender ID or wording does not match a registered template is blocked, which is why small, unregistered edits to a message cause sudden failures.

Register templates with variables for the parts that change, keep a list of registered template IDs, and register promotional and transactional messages separately. Allow time for approvals. Marichi Talks SMS is live in Zambia and Tanzania today; for India, WhatsApp templates follow Meta's own approval rather than DLT.