Bharti Airtel has removed a handful of tariff plans for its prepaid customer base, including those offering longer validity periods, as it continues to nudge prepaid customers towards higher-priced plans and postpaid services, even as headline tariffs remain unchanged. According to the company’s mobile recharge portal, the base plan starts at ₹199, offering 2 GB of data for 28 days, with the next plan now priced at ₹219, offering 3 GB of data, followed by a ₹349 plan offering unlimited 5G data. Plans priced at ₹299, ₹319, ₹579 and ₹619, offering 1.5 GB of data daily, and ₹649, offering 2 GB daily, with validity periods of 56 or 60 days, have been discontinued.
People aware of the development said the move was in line with the company’s consistent stand that customers with higher data usage would have to pay more and that unlimited data was distorting the way plans were priced across the industry.
“The way that we really need to think about price architecture as an industry needs to fundamentally change over the next few years,” Bharti Airtel Executive Vice-Chairman Gopal Vittal said during the No. 2 carrier’s earnings call last week, pressing for a change in tariff pricing in the Indian market. “The most important thing is to repair the (pricing) architecture, meaning that for a very low level of pricing, you get unlimited data, which means ARPU (average revenue per user per month) is capped. That is not a healthy way to operate. Because markets naturally expand from small to extra-large, and if you just operate with a more sensible price architecture in the next five to seven years, you will see sustained growth just on account of ARPU as India gets more affluent. That would be a good place to go, and there is no need to touch the entry-level pricing,” Vittal said. He noted that making subscribers with higher data usage pay more was more crucial than simply raising general rates for carriers to remain financially sustainable in the long term.
Industry insiders said the tariff changes could well be followed by rivals Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea, albeit at a different pace and across different tariff tiers, with headline tariff changes still some time away.
“This is not a headline tariff increase or correction, since the base plan price has not been changed upwards. However, it is noticeable that most plans now have 28 days validity, much like the postpaid plans that are charged on a monthly basis. Clearly, this is a push to ger prepaid customers to move to postpaid,” said a senior sector analyst who did not want to be named. Another executive said the move could be seen as a precursor to impending tariff increases. “We delay tariff hike assumptions by a quarter to late 2026,” said analysts at IIFL Capital, who had earlier expected the next round of tariff hikes to take place in the July-September quarter.
