Airtel has withdrawn four prepaid recharge plans across India — the ₹299, ₹579, ₹619 and ₹649 packs — with the change taking effect on 12 August 2026. None of the four is visible any longer on the Airtel Thanks app or on Airtel’s own recharge page, and searching for the ₹299 plan now returns other options instead. Airtel has not announced a tariff hike and has not issued a statement about the removals; what it has done is delete four price points, which for the customers who were on them amounts to the same thing.
What the discontinued Airtel prepaid plans offered
The four withdrawn packs sat in Airtel’s mid-tier band, covering validity from 28 days to 84 days, with daily data allowances between 1.5GB and 2GB.
- ₹299 — 1.5GB daily data, unlimited calls and SMS benefits, 28 days validity
- ₹579, ₹619 and ₹649 — longer-validity options aimed at customers who preferred not to recharge every month
The ₹299 pack is the one that matters most, because it was the cheapest way to get a genuine daily-data-plus-unlimited-calling bundle on a monthly cycle. That price point no longer exists.
What you have to move to now, and what it costs
The nearest equivalent to the ₹299 plan is the ₹349 pack: 2GB of daily data over 28 days, with the same unlimited-calling structure. That is ₹50 more per recharge, an increase of roughly 16% for the same 28-day cycle.
Airtel’s framing here writes itself — you get 500MB more data per day. But a large share of the people on a ₹299 daily-data pack chose it because it was the cheapest one available, not because 1.5GB was insufficient. For them the extra data is not a benefit they asked for; it is a bundled justification for a higher floor. Over a year of monthly recharges, the shift from ₹299 to ₹349 costs an additional ₹600.
The cheaper packs that survive are not substitutes. The ₹199 plan still exists with 2GB of total data across 28 days, and the ₹219 plan with 3GB total over the same period — these are cumulative-data packs, not daily-data packs, and anyone using more than about 100MB a day will exhaust them in the first week. For customers who want unlimited calling with a daily data bucket, ₹349 is now the entry point.
One practical note before you recharge: the exact set of alternatives can vary by telecom circle, so check the Airtel Thanks app for what is actually listed in your own circle rather than assuming the national list applies.
Why this is happening now
Airtel has been open for some time about wanting to raise its average revenue per user, and pruning low-priced tiers is the least visible way to do it. A headline tariff hike draws regulatory attention, press coverage and customer anger. Quietly retiring a ₹299 plan so that its users drift to ₹349 on their next recharge produces a similar effect on ARPU with none of the noise, and it does not require Airtel to say anything at all.
This also arrives against a backdrop of tariff-hike speculation. Market reports and research analyses have suggested Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea could raise prepaid and postpaid tariffs by roughly 12% to 15% in coming months. That is speculation and should be treated as such — none of the three operators has announced anything of the kind, and no such increase should be reported as confirmed until one of them does. What is confirmed is the narrower fact: four Airtel plans are gone, and the replacement for the most popular of them costs 16% more.
If you are on one of the withdrawn packs, your current recharge continues to run until its validity expires; the removal affects new recharges, not active ones. Use that window to compare Jio and Vi’s daily-data packs at the same price point before your renewal date, rather than defaulting to whatever the app surfaces first — that default is exactly what a portfolio change like this is designed to capture.
For wider context on how price pressure is reshaping what Indian buyers get for their money, see our report on India’s smartphone shipments hitting a five-year low.
Sources: tipster Abhishek Yadav on X, via Business Today; additional plan detail from Trak.in
