Rules

What you are actually allowed to send a buyer in India

Most sales teams find out the rules after a number gets blocked. Here is the short version, in plain words, before that happens.

13 October 2026 · About seven minutes

A buyer fills a form on a Saturday evening. By Sunday morning three people have called her, two have sent a brochure on WhatsApp, and one has texted at half past eleven at night. Nobody meant any harm. Everyone was doing their job.

In India, most of that was against the rules.

The rules are not complicated, but they are spread across three different places and nobody hands you a summary when you join a sales team. This is that summary.

There are really four questions

Before a message goes out, four things decide whether you are allowed to send it.

• Did this person agree to hear from you
• Have they told the country they do not want marketing
• Is it a reasonable hour where they are
• Is the message itself one you registered in advance

Get any one of those wrong and the message is either illegal, blocked, or both. Most teams only know about the second one.

One. Consent has to be real

India's data protection law says consent must be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous, and the person has to do something active to give it. A pre-ticked box is not consent. Burying it in terms and conditions is not consent. "They filled a form so obviously they want calls" is not consent either, unless the form said so.

Specific matters more than people realise. Agreeing to a site visit confirmation is not agreeing to a monthly newsletter. Agreeing to WhatsApp is not agreeing to calls.

They can also withdraw it, and withdrawing has to be as easy as giving it was. If signing up took one tap, unsubscribing cannot take an email to support.

The practical test: if the person later said "I never agreed to this", could you show exactly what they saw and what they ticked, on what date? If not, you do not have consent. You have an assumption.

Two. The Do Not Disturb registry

Anyone in India can register their number to stop commercial messages, either entirely or by category, like property or banking. This is run by the telecom regulator and it is not optional for you.

If a number is registered and you send marketing anyway, two things happen. The message gets blocked, and complaints accumulate against the sender, which can get your header suspended. That means every message from your company stops, including the ones to people who did want them.

The important thing most teams get wrong: consent and DND are separate checks. Someone can have given you consent and still be on the registry, and the registry does not simply disappear because they filled your form. You check both, every time.

Three. The hour matters

Promotional calls and messages have time restrictions. Broadly, nothing late at night and nothing early in the morning. Transactional messages, like a payment receipt or an appointment reminder, are treated differently from promotional ones.

Two practical traps. First, your buyer may not be in your time zone. An NRI buyer in Dubai or Toronto is a real part of the Indian market, and nine in the evening for you is the middle of their night. Second, an automated sequence does not know what time it is unless someone made it care. A follow-up scheduled for "three days later" will cheerfully fire at two in the morning.

Four. The message has to be registered in advance

This is the one that surprises people most. You cannot simply type a marketing SMS and send it. In India, commercial messaging runs through a registration system where your company, your sender name, and the text of the message itself all have to be registered and approved before anything goes out.

You register a template with gaps in it, like "Dear [name], your site visit at [project] is confirmed for [time]". You can fill the gaps. You cannot change the sentence. If you want to say something new, you register a new template and wait for it to be approved.

Which means the sales executive who wants to send a clever one-off message to a hot lead cannot, and the campaign you want to launch tomorrow needed its templates registered last week.

WhatsApp has its own rules on top

WhatsApp is where most Indian property conversations actually happen, and it adds a layer that has nothing to do with Indian law.

The one that catches everybody is the window. When a buyer messages you, a conversation opens, and for the next twenty four hours you can reply freely, in your own words, like a normal human being. Once that window closes, you cannot. You can only send a template you registered with WhatsApp in advance and which they approved.

So the follow-up you want to send on day three is a different kind of message from the one you sent on day one, and if your team does not know that, they write a thoughtful personal message and it silently fails to deliver.

WhatsApp also sorts templates into kinds, roughly marketing, utility and authentication, and it charges differently and judges them differently. A marketing template that reads like a utility message gets rejected.

What this means on a normal Tuesday

You do not need to memorise any of this. You need a system that checks it before anything goes out, because people will not remember at five in the evening with a target to hit.

At minimum, before any message, something should be checking: did this person consent on this channel, have they unsubscribed or bounced, are they on the registry, is it a sensible hour where they actually are, have we already hit the cap for today, is this template approved, and if it is WhatsApp, is the window still open.

If any of those answers is no, the message should not go. And when it does not go, somebody should be able to find out why, months later, without guessing.

The part nobody tells you

The reason to get this right is not the fine. Fines are rare and slow.

The reason is that your sender header is shared. Every project, every campaign, every executive sends under it. When it gets suspended because one person sent one unregistered blast to a registered number, everything stops. The appointment reminders stop. The payment receipts stop. The buyers who wanted to hear from you stop hearing from you, in the middle of a launch.

That is the actual cost, and it lands on the quarter you least want it to.

---

This is a plain summary, not legal advice. The rules change, and the details differ by message type and operator. Check anything expensive with a lawyer who does this properly.