Telecom operator Bharti Airtel’s Chairman Sunil Mittal on Monday said that the company would not shy away from raising tariffs. 

Mr Mittal was speaking to investors a day after Airtel’s board had approved raising up to Rs 21,000 crore by way of a rights issue at a price of Rs 535 per share. 

In a rare move, the Bharti Airtel chairman attended about an hour-long investor call, answering queries related to the rights issue as well as those pertaining to the telecom sector. 

Asked if Airtel would take a lead in raising tariffs in future, Mr Mittal said that the company had already been doing it in a limited manner by pushing up base tariffs to Rs 79. 

“Can this go to Rs 99 eventually? My answer is yes. The question is when....In the end, we are also bound by market forces. We can’t be outlier beyond a point. You can be having some premium given on strength of the brand, but you can’t go beyond a point, where you start to hurt yourself,” Mr Mittal observed. 

Airtel would be “vigilant” and “happy to take small baby steps which could even be first and foremost compared to others”, he pointed out. 

“People are consuming average 16 gb of data per user per month. It is time that tariffs do take a tick-up to make the industry viable and, more importantly, have decent and appropriate returns on capital to grow into more technology areas to roll out more networks and become more viable model of sustainability in the future,” Mr Mittal said. 

He stressed that the industry needed to have “right economic model”, and rued that “for far too long, we have played in this game by growing this industry at a very minimal pricing level”.