HIGHLIGHTS

• Airtel will provide Rs. 50 discount on seven recharges
• The discounts will be applied automatically on the next recharge
• Buyers will get the  only once a month

Airtel is offering prepaid customers 100 percent cashback on purchasing the Rs. 349 recharge pack. The offer is only applicable for purchases made via Airtel Payments Bank, a move to promote the adoption of the service by the operator. This offer is similar to the one announced by Reliance Jio two weeks ago, where customers received 100 percent cashback on purchasing the Rs. 399 plan. Airtel has not yet announced when the offer will end.

The new offer gives customers 100 percent cashback over seven months, in the form of a Rs. 50 discount  when they purchase the next recharge. The Rs. 50 cashback will be added in the Airtel Payments Bank account and applied automatically while buying a recharge, and will be provided only once in a month. You can use the sum for other transactions made via the Payments Bank account as well, not just the Airtel recharge. Notably, the cashback will be given only from the second month from the date of recharge. To avail the offer, the prepaid users need to purchase the Rs. 349 plan only from the MyAirtel app.

For those unaware, the Rs. 349 plan provides customers with 28GB of data, doled out at 1GB per day. Along with this, it comes with bundled local and STD calls, and has validity of 28 days. Customers will get 1,000 minutes of calls bundled per week without any charges; if they exhaust the limit, the calls will charged at 10 paisa per minute for calls to Airtel numbers, and 30 paisa per minute for calls to other networks. Similarly, the free calls are limited to 250 minutes per day, after which the same 10 paisa per minute, and 30 paisa per minute tariffs are levied for calls to Airtel and other networks, respectively.

Airtel and Jio are locked in a battle for supremacy of the telecom sector, which the latter upended with its free calls and data when it started operations in 2016. Over the past year, while incumbents started offering data and calls bundled in relatively affordable plans, Jio has steadily been making its plans more in line with industry requirements. In the latest tariff revision on Diwali, the company has raised the prices of its most popular prepaid plan, and reduced the validity of the postpaid plans; the post-FUP speed has also been cut in half.