Prefix ‘0’ for all landline to mobile calls from Jan 15

With the consideration of TRAI Recommendation on “Ensuring Adequate Numbering Resources for Fixed Line and Mobile Services” Department of Telecommunications has taken the decision of implementing the following:

    1. All Fixed to Mobile calls will be dialed with prefix ‘0’ from 15th January, 2021.

    2. There will be no change in dialing plan from fixed to fixed, mobile to fixed and mobile to mobile calls.

    3. Suitable announcement will be made for the same. This announcement shall be played whenever a subscriber dials a fixed to mobile call without prefixing ‘0’.

    4. All fixed line subscribers will be provided with ‘0’ dialing facility.

    5. A total of approximately 2539 million numbering series is expected to be generated from the above. This will free up sufficient numbering resources for future use.

    6. With the freeing up of sufficient numbering resources, more number of connections can be added in future which will be beneficial to the mobile customers at large.

    7. The above changes have been done in order to have minimum inconvenience to the subscribers and freeing up essential numbering resources.

Need to re-introduce ‘0’

India has 10-digit mobile numbering plans and numbers starting with '0' and '1' are reserved for special purposes which will be around 800 crore possible numbers. Currently, mobile numbers are registered to series starting from 9, and with 8,7,6 which totals to 115 crore mobile numbers. Series start with 9 is completely utilised. Therefore, to create sufficient numbering combinations, the prefix '0' has been re-introduced.

'2' has been allocated to landline numbers of BSNL and MTNL, '4' has been allocated to Airtel, '35' & '796' has been allocated to Reliance Jio. The prefix '0' will not only clear the overlap between landline and mobile phone numbers carrying the same series but will also free up numbering resources for mobile phones in future.

(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants. The views expressed here are personal.)