Guides on WhatsApp Business API, AI voice calls, SMS and omnichannel messaging for Indian businesses.
India’s DPDP consent rules are not in force yet: the consent standard, the notice duty and every penalty commence around 13 May 2027. What binds your marketing today is TCCCPR — and section 6(10) already puts the burden of proof on you.
Most DLT content template rejections trace to three provisions in Schedule-I: the three-variable ceiling, the thirty per cent fixed-content condition, and one template per header. From 17 December 2026 a wrong-category approval costs far more than a rejection.
What an automated NPS call really costs in India: published carriage rates, 30-second pulse rounding, why WhatsApp cannot price a generic feedback survey as utility, and the cost per returned score at each response rate. All figures verified 14 October 2026.
A WhatsApp broadcast ceiling counts unique recipients in a moving 24-hour period, is shared across every number in your business portfolio, and starts at 250. Figures verified 15 October 2026.
WhatsApp’s status webhook defines exactly five values — sent, delivered, read, failed and played. Here is what each one means, why a delivered/read rate is harder to compute than it looks, and why SMS and voice have no equivalent signal at all.
Cost per customer reached is your whole channel invoice, GST included, divided by the people who demonstrably got the message. Published India WhatsApp, SMS and voice rates, read 6 October 2026, and the arithmetic that makes them comparable.
TRAI’s message categories set a price, not just a label: up to ₹0.05 per promotional and service SMS, none named for transactional, and a new per-minute charge on A2P calls from 17 November 2026.
Short answer: In 2026, most published bulk SMS rates in India fall between roughly ₹0.10 and ₹0.22 per SMS before
IVR, CATI and WhatsApp surveys are priced in three incomparable units. Published rates read 12 October 2026, the Meta rule that decides whether a WhatsApp survey costs 14.5 paise or 1.09 rupees, and a worked example of 1,000 completed interviews by all three methods.
A WhatsApp template’s category is a price, not a label. On the only India rate card that verified, marketing costs 7.52 times utility. What Meta requires of a utility template, the three ways a category changes after approval, and what a re-categorisation costs on 40,000 messages a month.
