While you were doomscrolling your data got dearer by 20 pc

In April, Reliance Jio quietly changed the terms of its ₹195 recharge pack

In April, Reliance Jio quietly changed the terms of its ₹195 recharge pack. The 90-day pack would now have a validity of 30 days. In other words, a customer who paid once for three months would now have to pay every month. But alone Jio wasn’t tinkering with prices. Airtel revised the price of its ₹179 plan to ₹199. There were no headlines. Operators change plans routinely.

While you were doomscrolling your data got dearer by 20 pc

Across India, the cost of staying connected on a mobile phone is quietly going up.

And now Jio Platforms, the mothership on which Reliance Jio rides, is set to go public with its IPO, the draft prospectus for which is available for scrutiny. When looked at closely, the company has an interesting story to tell. The Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)-- the amount each customer pays every month, has “significant headroom for growth”. The first reason it gives is “periodic tariff rationalisation”. In other words, price hikes are possible. The document is honest. The current hikes by Jio and Airtel are a precursor of what lies ahead. Analysts expect Vodafone Idea to follow soon.

The consensus is that between October and December, mobile telephony will be more expensive by 12 to 15 per cent. The head of research at a foreign bank, who declined to be named, points to what sits underneath the timing: through most of the last decade, tariffs stayed low because 8 to 10 operators were competing for the same customer. India now has three private players. But, both he, and Sanskar Rathee, Research Analyst at Twimbit, agree that Indian mobile users pay the lowest prices against global averages.

Two operators, the same entry tier, four months apart, in a market with only three private players left. As Rathee from Twimbit puts it, this is not routine housekeeping. It is what happens when a market has consolidated down to such few players that a price-sensitive customer has nowhere cheaper left to go. The third lever, which Vodafone Idea has leaned on hardest, is downgrading benefits at an unchanged price: unlimited data plans quietly recast as capped ones.

There is an unglamorous arithmetic sitting underneath all three levers, one that Rathee flags as the mechanism to watch. Much of the industry is converging its validity cycles on 28 days rather than 30. That sounds trivial until you count: 28 days means 13 recharges a year instead of 12, an automatic 8 per cent increase in annual spend without a single rupee being added to any price tag. It is, in effect, a full tariff hike, extracted through the calendar rather than the price list.

But Rathee says consumption is genuinely surging. Jio’s own filing shows per-user data use is rising from a little over 33 GB to almost 42 GB a month in a year. A customer burning through that much data does not need to be nudged off a 1GB-a-day plan; they have outgrown it on their own.

Bundling too is a real value exchange: once a recharge includes JioHotstar or cloud storage, the customer is no longer pricing data, they are pricing a package, and operators tend to win that comparison honestly. Telecom executives will also, not unreasonably, point out that a large share of network capex is dollar-denominated even as revenue is earned in a rupee that depreciates every year, and that Indian data remains among the world’s cheapest by a wide margin.

While all of this is true. None of it explains why a 90-day pack became a 30-day pack at the same price without a word said about it. And how come a 20 per cent hike has not drawn headlines, political noise, or some review? Asked whether customers in smaller towns would pay quietly or push back, the banker who refused to be named, simply asked: “Protest for what? Where is the choice?”

Jio’s prospectus is not wrong about where Indian tariffs are headed. It is simply the only document in this story that calls the direction out loud. Everyone paying the bill is left to do the arithmetic on their own.