The Game Of Thrones

India’s three surviving telecom giants —Vodafone Idea, Bharti Airtel, and Reliance Jio— are fighting a bruising battle for the top spot in the market. The jury is out on who will win the price war unleashed by Jio’ s rock-bottom rates.

- T. Surendar

One late October morning in New Delhi, the head honchos of India’s top three private telecom companies walked in together for a premier mobile technology conference. The bonhomie between them—Reliance Jio’s Mukesh Ambani, Bharti Airtel’s Sunil Bharti Mittal, and Vodafone Idea’s Kumar Mangalam Birla—was hard to miss. Ambani put his arm around Mittal as they went up to the dais for the opening session of the India Mobile Congress to join Birla. Later, Ambani was unusually chatty as Birla listened intently.

But beneath the cheeriness lies an intense business rivalry. The three telecom giants are fighting a brutal battle for the top spot in the 1.5 lakh crore Indian telecom market, where the competition has been so fierce that several once-successful companies have either been forced to shut shop or been bought out altogether. And at the heart of all this lies a bruising price war unleashed by Reliance Jio which shook the industry to its core by offering free calls and dirt-cheap data when it entered the market in September 2016. “We want to offer the best services at the cheapest prices and make it affordable to every Indian,” Ambani said in his speech at the mobile congress.