Bharti Airtel on Monday announced that it will extend the validity of pre-paid packs for over 8 crore customers till 17 April to shield its low-income user base during the three-week nationwide lockdown to curb the novel Coronavirus epidemic.

Highlights: 

  • The company will provide these users unrestricted incoming services till 17 April and ₹10 talk time
  • These benefits will be available to users in the next 48 hours, Bharti Airtel said

Airtel says they will also credit Rs 10 to the accounts of each of these 80 million users so that they can make calls and send messages to their friends and family. This and the extension of the validity period means Airtel prepaid users will continue to get incoming calls on their phone even after the plan is exhausted. “In this difficult hour of fighting off the threat of Covid-19, Airtel is committed to ensuring that all people remain connected without any disruptions. And for this objective, it is critical to take care of the under-privileged daily wage earners of our country, whose lives have been disrupted due to the lock-down,” says Shashwat Sharma, Chief Marketing Officer, Bharti Airtel.

Airtel believes that extending these benefits to 80 million prepaid mobile customers should effectively cover all underprivileged households that may be on the Airtel Network. “These special measures will particularly benefit migrant workers and daily wage earners who may have been impacted due to the nationwide lockdown to combat COVID-19. All other customers on Airtel’s network are already recharging their accounts using online platforms,” says Bharti Airtel in a statement.

These benefits will be available to users in the next 48 hours, Bharti Airtel said.

“In this difficult hour of fighting off the threat of COVID-19, Airtel is committed to ensuring that all people remain connected without any disruptions,” Bharti Airtel chief marketing officer Shashwat Sharma said as per the release.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced a three-week lockdown starting 25 March in a bid to curb the spread of the pandemic in India as cases had just crossed 500.

The lockdown is expected to hit daily wage earners and the poor the most, and this has forced the government to undertake a slew of measures like increasing the wages under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme, transfer of cash to the women Jan Dhan bank account holders and free cylinders, among others.

So far, there are 1,287 total cases confirmed, out of which 118 have recovered while 40 died.

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