Airtel Money has bagged its first major agreement to offer mobile money transfer services. It tied up with the Andhra Pradesh Government to allow its two crore users in the State to pay utility bill payments through Mee Seva (Your Service, a Government-to-citizen service).
The service can be accessed even by those who have a basic phone. They can pay bills any time of the day from any part of the country by dialling *400#. Then, the application would take them through a step-by-step process that would seek the basic details of the bill.
“Fill all of that and say ok, your bill is paid. We will charge Rs 10 for every transaction. It need not use GPRS or SMS to use the service,” Sharlin Thayil, Chief Executive Officer (AP) of Bharti Airtel, said.
Addressing a press conference after launching the service, he said the subscribers needed to check into Airtel’s retail shops (about 1,000 of them for now) and buy some mobile money credits. They can use them to pay bills without having to stand in the long queues. To begin with, the service is being offered in Hyderabad and Rangareddy districts. “We will expand this service to other parts in phases,” he soon.
He claimed that Andhra Pradesh was the first State in the country to bring utility payment services onto the mobile platform.
He said one can transfer up to Rs 10,000 a day from the mobile platform
Sanjay Jaju, Secretary, IT, Andhra Pradesh, said the Government would offer this service in Telugu also as the service has been rolled out in rural areas.
Earlier, AP’s Information Technology Minister, Ponnala Lakshmaiah, launched Mee Seva portal, the G2C platform that registered average transactions of 50,000 a day.
This portal would also allow payment using credit cards and bank accounts.