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Telephone numbers in India

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The article describes the allocation of Telephone numbers in India. The distribution of Telephone numbers is mainly looked upon by Department of Telecommunications (commonly called DoT) in India. To place a call from outside India, for fixed line service +91-(STD Code)-(Telephone number). A sample MTNL fixed line phone number in Mumbai would be +91-22-22221500. Within India, when placing a call outside your home district you have to prefix an STD code. For example, to place call from Delhi to Chennai prefix "044" which is the STD code for Chennai, followed by the 8-digit telephone number. And when, dialing within a home district the calls are directly placed using just the telephone numbers.

Telephone numbers in India
Location
CountryIndia
ContinentAsia
Typeopen
Access codes
Country code+91
International access00
Long-distance0
A public call office (PCO) in Auroville, India

Fixed (landline) numbers

Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) codes are assigned to each city/town/village, with the larger Metro cities having shorter area codes (STD codes), the shortest being 2 digits. For example,

Tier-2 Cities in India have STD code with 3 digits. For example,

Kanpur and Lucknow were the two cities between which the first STD call of the country was made.[citation needed]

Land line numbers are at most 8 digits long (usually in major metros). The total length of all phone numbers (STD code and the phone number) in India is constant at 10 digits, for example 7513200000 signifies a STD code i.e. 751 Gwalior & the phone number 3200000. Due to the availability of multiple operators offering fixed line services (either over wire or wireless), there is an operator-code for each telephone number, which is the first digit in the phone number. These are:

Thus, a number formatted as 020-30303030 means a fixed-line Reliance number in Pune, while 011-20000198 is an MTNL fixed line in Delhi and 033-45229320 is an Airtel number in Kolkata, and 07582-221434 is a BSNL number from Sagar.

No prefix is required to call from one landline to another in the same STD area. A prefix of "0+STD code" is required to dial from a landline phone in one STD code area to another. A prefix of "0+STD code" is required to dial from a mobile phone in India to any landline number, irrespective of STD area.

For example, to call a landline number in Indore, one would have to dial

  • from a land line in Indore: only the required phone number
  • from a land line in Mumbai: 0731 and then the required phone number
  • from a mobile phone anywhere in India: 0731 and then the required phone number

There were some exceptions to this general rule for STD areas falling close to each other (within a radius of 200 kilometre), where "0" can be replaced with "95" e.g. to dial Delhi from Gurgaon, one dials 9511+landline number. This feature was stopped with effect from 00:00 hours of 10 March 2009, as per Department of Telecommunications memorandum dated 9 February 2009.[1]

Short codes

There are many companies in the Indian market who rent keywords, on a monthly basis, whose characters, on a typical mobile phone keypad, represent short codes. Short codes are five digits in length and have to start with the digit '5' like 58888 as of 2007. Previously, they were four-digit in number and could be of any combination, like 8888 or 7827. The current five digits can be extended by three digits further representing 3 additional characters. Messages sent to these Short Codes are commonly referred to as Premium Rate SMS Messages and cost from Rs. 3 to Rs. 6 per message depending on the operator as well as the service and the company.

Telemarketing

Telemarketers have been issued 10-digit telephone numbers starting with 140 (140XXXXXXX) by the Department of Telecommunications on TRAI's request.[2][3]

See also

References

  1. ^ "DoT Memorandum 10th Feb 09" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-04-08.
  2. ^ Trai fails to set deadline on pesky calls
  3. ^ 'Publishing tariff plans by telecom service providers mandatory'
  4. ^ TRAI for 10-digit landline numbers to meet crunch
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