Andrew Bonwick
Vice President of Product Development at Relm Insurance
Madhav Sheth
CEO of Ai+ Smartphone
Stephen Rose
CEO Render Networks

To simplify their prepaid portfolio, telecom operators made a significant move last month. The private telecom operators except for Reliance Jio, notably including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and Tata Docomo officially resorted to removing certain recharges from their portfolio, and introduced minimum recharges which would keep the subscribers’ incoming and outgoing calls on when they ran out of a prepaid plan. The telcos made this move in an attempt to increase their average revenue per users (ARPU) and to weed out non-paying customers from their subscriber base. Previously Airtel and Vodafone Idea had introduced minimum recharge plans of Rs 35, Rs 65 and Rs 95, however, as per our latest observation, Airtel has introduced a new minimum smart recharge plan of Rs 23. Read ahead to know more about Airtel’s new minimum recharge pack.

Airtel Rs 23 Minimum Recharge Pack
Airtel subscribers can catch the details of this new recharge under the Airtel’s ‘Smart Recharge’ section on the official Airtel website. Previously Airtel was offering smart recharges starting with Rs 25. Unlike other smart recharges which offer talk time, data and rate cutter benefits, this plan is merely going to extend the validity of the subscriber’s plan and is going to offer other services like SMS and calling at the usual rate. This plan will extend the account validity by 28 days and will provide all local and STD calls at 2.5p/sec. Further, the SMS will be charged at Re 1 for local SMS and Rs 1.5 for national SMS. Apart from that, this plan does not bundle any data benefit.
Airtel Smart Recharges Up to Rs 245
The other smart recharges listed on the Airtel official website start from Rs 25 and go as high as Rs 245. The second Rs 25 Smart Recharge ships a talk time of Rs 18.69 to the subscribers along with 10MB data which is valid for 28 days. Next on this list is the Rs 35 Smart Recharge which ships Rs 26.6 talk time to the users and it also offers the rate cutter benefit with a discount of 60 paise per minute or 1 paise per second. It also bundles 100MB data for 28 days validity period.