"The company would arrange economical handsets for the rural subscribers so that the mobile phone availability is within their reach," Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the three states hub Sanjeev Kumar Saxena told a press conference here today.
He said that Bharti Airtel has also tied up with IFFCO as a partner for rural operations so that the agriculturalists additionally get information beneficial to them, including relating to weather, farm prices and on agricultural inputs. The IFFCO members would also be given a calling rate of 50 paise per minute against the normal local tariff of Re one per minute for urban areas, Saxena said. He said the company enjoys a 30 per cent market share in the three states and provides service through 6,000 sites the number of which would increase further to meet the future growth.
Saxena said that Bharti Airtel has crossed the five million-customer mark in the three states for which the company has recently created a unified administrative hub at Mohali in Punjab near here. The company has 31.81 customers in Punjab, 10.52 lakh customers in Haryana and 8.05 lakh customers in Himachal Pradesh, he said adding Airtel covers 100 per cent of all census towns in the three states and majority of the villages.