DPI Brief — September 23, 2026

TRAI rewrites the spam rulebook, and the Centre dissolves its own spectrum commission (L7 — Trust). Two structural shifts hit the trust layer this week. First, TRAI has notified the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Third Amendment) Regulations, 2026 on September 18, putting AI/ML-based spam detection inside the formal regulatory framework: new Regulation 21A obliges the receiving telecom operator to flag suspected spam caller-lines and share the evidence with the sending operator within two hours, and when five or more lines linked to one sender are flagged within ten days, graded action follows — KYC re-verification, physical verification, barring of outgoing services. Caller-ID and call-management apps like Truecaller are brought under direct compliance oversight and barred from blanket-blocking the 1600xx/1601xx transactional and 140xx promotional number bands, while consumers get a 15-day appellate window through the TRAI DND app, operator portals and 1909. Enforcement phases in over 30 and 60 days once the regulations are officially notified. Second, and quieter: the government has dissolved the 37-year-old Digital Communications Commission by resolution dated September 19 — the Department of Telecommunications apex body that approved spectrum pricing decisions and most TRAI recommendations. Who now signs off on spectrum calls, and under what procedure, is the question regulators and operators will be asking.

The payments layer hits a 79-crore-a-day record just as the MDR clock runs down (L2 — Payments). Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on September 22 that India’s digital public infrastructure settled an average of about 79 crore transactions every day in August 2026, citing DPI scale as a core growth input alongside 34% capital formation to GDP. The milestone lands mid-political-storm: the 0.4% MDR on UPI payments above ₹2,000 takes effect October 15, and the Finance Ministry’s Department of Financial Services has publicly rejected claims that the charge was introduced under US pressure, stating that the September 15 NPCI circular restricts UPI credit transactions to RuPay credit cards alone — “to enable the RuPay credit card to become the preferred choice of credit card amongst users in India.” With Madhya Pradesh’s petrol pumps already announcing a UPI boycott above ₹2,000 from October 16, the tension between record scale and new merchant-side fees is now the defining payments story of the fortnight; merchants will be watching whether other state associations follow.

CAG builds the audit bench for digital government (L6 — Governance). A development that drew little mainstream attention when it launched is getting its fullest airing this week: on August 27, Comptroller and Auditor General K Sanjay Murthy and IIT Madras director V Kamakoti jointly launched CADS — the Certification on Audit of Digital Systems — a national credential for auditing AI systems, privacy controls and digital public platforms, developed at IIT Madras. The logic is blunt: India has pushed further than most countries into “government as code” — Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, GSTN, CoWIN — so the statutory audit capacity that examines public spending has to extend into the software layer that now mediates it. If the CAG’s mandate over digital systems hardens into routine certified audits, DPI’s accountability infrastructure starts to catch up with its delivery infrastructure. For an ecosystem that has scaled faster than its oversight, this is the governance-layer story to track into 2027.

ONDC gets a festive-season MSME storefront (L4 — Commerce). ZillyBuy has launched NavBharat, an ONDC-powered storefront dedicated to affordable made-in-India products from MSME sellers and homegrown brands, timed for the festive season and shipping across 20,000+ pin codes with ONDC-verified sellers. The pitch is the network’s standard one, sharpened for small suppliers: a seller in one state reaches buyers in another through shared infrastructure rather than platform-by-platform onboarding. The backdrop numbers — ONDC crossed 500 million cumulative transactions in July 2026 with more than 200,000 active retail sellers — show the network’s retail volume compounding even as its catalog depth remains thinner than the large marketplaces NavBharat-style storefronts are trying to counter.

LPG eKYC enters its final week (L1 — Identity). With the October 1 deadline for mandatory biometric Aadhaar authentication now eight days out, operational guidance has crystallized: consumers can complete e-KYC from home through their oil-marketing company’s app — IndianOil ONE, Hello BPCL or HP Pay — with the UIDAI Aadhaar FaceRD app performing the background facial authentication, or at the distributor or during delivery. About 89.9% of households have completed e-KYC after seven deadline extensions between June 30 and September 14. What laggards face is now explicit: no subsidy and no standard 14.2 kg refill — only 5 kg or 10 kg cylinders at market prices, against an implicit subsidy of roughly ₹210 per 14.2 kg cylinder. It is identity infrastructure being used as a compliance gate on an essential commodity, and the last-mile completion numbers will be the test of whether mandatory biometrics can close a gap seven extensions could not.

Week ahead: LPG Aadhaar gate — 8 days; UPI MDR switch — 22 days; and the notifications calendar for TRAI’s spam rules now formally ticking.