Bharti Airtel wins NASSCOM IT Innovation Award 06

Mumbai, February 9th, 2007: Bharti Airtel Limited, India's leading provider of Telecommunications services, has been awarded the coveted Nasscom IT Innovation Award for the Business Model Innovation for the year 2006.This award is testimony to the pioneering strategy of Bharti Airtel that outsourced its IT function to another leader in its domain, IBM.

The Hon'ble Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh presented the award to Dr. Jai Menon, Director IT & Innovation - Bharti Airtel, at the annual NASSCOM event today in Mumbai.

Bharti Airtel Ltd has received this award for the Innovative S1 ITO agreement that it has entered into with IBM during the year. This initiative, which is a first in the telecom industry, is in line with Bharti Airtel's strategy to achieve business leadership through technology and innovation by achieving operational efficiencies and driving new revenue streams.

On receiving the award, Dr. Jai Menon, Director, IT & Innovation, Bharti Airtel said, "When we took the strategic decision to outsource to IBM, it was an industry first. We were very clear that at the heart of this agreement is not 'outsourcing' but 'transformation'. We are extremely delighted that today the initiative is not only successful but has created new industry standards in true Bharti manner. We thank NASSCOM for recognizing this innovation in business model even as we celebrate the Bharti spirit of leading innovation and change in the Telecom industry."

The yearly award is presented to the best innovation in the country under three categories "� Business Model Innovation, Product Innovation; and Business Process Innovation. Bharti Airtel together with IBM has been awarded the prestigious award by setting a benchmark in the country for the most innovative Business Model.

Bharti Airtel's collaboration with IBM has drawn an IT roadmap with a state-of-the-art infrastructure to support its existing and new business operations. The result is a strategic, on demand, scalable business transformation agreement capable of diligently servicing the needs of millions of customers. This business transformation involves outsourcing Bharti Airtel's hardware, software and IT services requirements to IBM including all customer-facing IT applications as well as all internal-facing applications. IBM is also consolidating data centers, IT help desks, and disaster recovery capabilities on the infrastructure end.

About Bharti Airtel Limited

Bharti Airtel Limited is one of India's leading private sector providers of telecommunications services with an aggregate of 33.71 million customers as of end of December'06, consisting of 31.97 million mobile customers. Bharti Airtel has been rated among 10 best performing companies in the world in the BusinessWeek IT 100 list.

Bharti Airtel is structured into three strategic business units "� Mobile services, Broadband & Telephone (B&T) services and Enterprise services. The mobile business provides mobile & fixed wireless services using GSM technology across 23 telecom circles. The B&T business provides broadband & telephone services in 94 cities. The Enterprise services provide end-to-end telecom solutions to corporate customers and national & international long distance services to carriers. All these services are provided under the Airtel brand. Airtel's high-speed optic fibre network currently spans over 36,000 kms covering all the major cities in the country. The company has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems - i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Europe. For more information, visit www.bhartiairtel.in