Sunil Mittal-owned Bharti Group may soon become the first private telecom company to offer services in Jammu and Kashmir if their licence application gets government approval.
Besides J&K, Bharti on Tuesday also applied for five other licences under the unified regime, for circles of Uttar Pradesh (East), Rajasthan, West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
With this, the company will virtually have an all-India footprint in the telecom sector except for the North-East.
Bharti Group said it would be offering GSM-based cellular mobile services in all these circles.
According to officials, Bharti Televentures, the service arm of Bharti Group, has sought a Letter of Intent from the Department of Telecommunication to start services in these circles.
It has expressed its desire to offer cellular mobile services in the new circles at 900 MHz and where it was not available, it would offer services at 1800 MHz.
According to sources, the company would shell out between Rs 60 crore (Rs 600 million) to Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion) for all the circles.