Mobile Tariff Design Skewed In India; Rich Paying Less: Airtel MD

Bharti Airtel sees an opportunity in raising tariffs for data services as it feels that the rich are paying less and the poor are not required to pay anymore, a senior official of the company said. A customer needs to pay Rs 199 for a month-long connection which comes with unlimited local, STD, roaming calls and a 2GB data limit.

By paying Rs 100 more, a subscriber on Airtel can get 1 GB data per day and it goes up to 3 GB data per day with plans starting from Rs 449 onwards.

"The architecture of pricing in India is quite skewed. At the entry level itself or just above the entry level, you get so much data allowance, calling and messaging, that you really don't have any reason to upgrade. It's just an unfortunate situation where people who can afford to pay, the rich, are paying less and the poor, you know, we don't need to charge the poor anymore." Bharti Airtel Vice-Chairman and MD, Gopal Vittal said.

He was replying to a question on tariffs during the company's earnings call for the first quarter of the current fiscal.

Bharti Airtel has posted a 43% year-on-year increase in its consolidated profit to Rs 5,947.9 crore in the quarter ended June 2025 mainly on account of an increase in customer base.

Vittal said if India had a more sensible pricing architecture like Indonesia, ARPU (average revenue per user) would have been substantially higher than where the country's telecom industry is at present without any pain to customers at the low end.

As per UK-based data price information platform Cable.co.uk, average data price in India was around 16 cents while in Indonesia it was around 28 cents in 2023.

Bharti Airtel India operations average revenue per user, a key matrix to determine a telecom operator's growth, in India increased to Rs 250 during the June 2025 quarter under review compared to Rs 211 in the same period a year ago.

The mobile data consumption on Airtel's India network increased by 13.4% to 26.9 GB per customer per month.

The customer base of Airtel's Home Services segment, which includes fixed broadband services, grew 37.7% on YoY basis to 1.09 crore but the ARPU in the segment declined by 6.1% to Rs 537 in June 2025 quarter.

Consolidated revenue from operations of Bharti Airtel increased by 28.4% to Rs 49,463 crore during the reporting quarter from Rs 38,506.4 crore in the June quarter of the last year.