India’s rural mobile phone base slips further, shows Trai report

India’s mobile phone user base may have improved a bit in April after a steep fall in March, but Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) numbers show the rural subscriber base has consistently gone down since January. The rural mobile phone user base has eroded by 20 million since December.

Barring Reliance Jio, telcos are losing active subscribers. Data shows the active subscriber base is down to June 2018 levels. There are around 931 million active subscribers now (for the top three players) compared to 933 million in June 2018 and 915 million in May 2018. All other players put together have another 68 million active subscribers as of April 2019.