DLT (India) — Distributed Ledger Technology registration
What is DLT (India)?
DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology registration) is the mandatory registration system India's telecom regulator (TRAI) requires for any business sending commercial SMS, recording the sender's entity, message templates, and header (sender ID) on a blockchain-based ledger shared across all Indian telecom carriers. Unregistered senders, templates, or headers are blocked outright by Indian carriers, making DLT registration a hard prerequisite — not just a best practice — for sending SMS to Indian numbers.
More detail
DLT registration happens in stages: registering the business entity, then each specific sender header, then each individual message template — a mismatch between the registered template and the actual message content typically causes the send to be blocked.
Because DLT is enforced carrier-side across India as a shared ledger, there's no way to bypass it with a workaround the way an unregistered sender might partially get through in some other markets.
Frequently asked
- What happens if a message doesn't match its registered DLT template?
- Indian carriers block it outright — DLT enforcement checks the actual message content against the exact registered template, so even a small unregistered variation in wording can cause the send to fail rather than just being flagged.
- Is DLT registration a one-time setup?
- The entity registration is largely one-time, but each new sender header and each new message template needs its own separate DLT registration before it can be used to send commercial SMS to Indian numbers.
See also
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