To strengthen its presence in the Indian market, Airtel along with Research In Motion (RIM) rolled out a new service plan for Airtel customers.

The new service plan, named BlackBerry® Personal Mail allows Airtel customers to enjoy unlimited email and instant messaging (IM) on BlackBerry® smartphone at a monthly charge of just Rs 499.

It is the first service plan, which is priced below Rs 500 to offer unlimited email and IM to Indian BlackBerry smartphone customers.

Mr. Sanjay Gupta, Chief Marketing Officer, Mobile Services, Airtel said, “With the BlackBerry Personal Mail service plan, we are extending the market to a wider segment, allowing customers such as young professionals, small business owners and students to access their email on the move and stay seamlessly connected with instant messaging on their BlackBerry smartphones.”

Moreover, the Airtel customers are also offered unlimited access to the industry-leading email and instant messaging features on the BlackBerry platform.

The service also let customers to access up to 10 supported POP3/IMAP email accounts that consist of most popular ISP email accounts such as Yahoo! Mail and Google Mail in addition to various instant messaging services such as Windows Live Messenger, GTalk, Yahoo! Messenger and BlackBerry® Messenger through a single device.

Frenny Bawa, Vice President, India at Research In Motion said, “The new BlackBerry Personal Mail service plan from Airtel is an attractive offering that will enable more users to choose and enjoy BlackBerry smartphones.”

Bharti Airtel Limited is a group company of Bharti Enterprises, which is Asia’s top integrated telecommunication services provider with operations in India and Sri Lanka.

As of end of January 2009, the company has an aggregate of more than 91 million clients including 88.38 million mobile customers.

In a study conducted by The Wall Street Journal, Bharti Airtel Limited has been selected as India's most innovational company.