TRAI orders Indian Big Three to offer data-free tariffs

India’s three largest operators – Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea – will be required to offer affordable voice & SMS-only tariffs from next month, following a mandate from regulator TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India).

As reported by Times of India, TRAI has ordered that the new plans be made available from 21st October 2026. The tariffs are intended for low-income users who require short-term, flexible plans for calling and messaging but have less use for bundled data services.

Under TRAI’s mandate, operators must offer Special Tariff Vouchers (STVs) for voice and SMS with shorter validity periods of up to 30 days, with the option to renew monthly. Operators are also obliged to offer at least one longer validity plan solely for voice and SMS.

This is not the first time that TRAI has tried to address this issue; in December 2024, the regulator mandated that all operators must offer at least one voice and SMS-only STV, but this effectively resulted in lower availability of voice and SMS plans as operators offered limited validity options while failing to reduce prices to reflect the removal of data. To resolve this, the new mandate requires parity across validity periods.

For their part, all three operators formally opposed TRAI’s mandate, arguing that it was anti-consumer.  In particular, Jio claimed that voice now functions as an application on an underlying data network, making voice-only plans technically infeasible, and highlighting that 88% of its subscribers are active data users.

While TRAI has noted these objections, it has nonetheless pressed ahead with the mandate in the interests of consumer protection, arguing that users who do not require data will benefit from plans with the same validity period as data tariffs, but with proportionally lower prices.