Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MP Raghav Chadha on Monday spoke in the Rajya Sabha against daily data limits in prepaid mobile recharge plans.
Telcos offer recharge plans with “daily data limits such as 1.5GB, 2GB or 3GB per day” that reset every 24 hours. “Any unused data expires at midnight, even though it has been paid for in full,” Chadha said in an X post along with a video of his Rajya Sabha intervention.
“No refund. No renewal. It just expired. This is not an accident. This is the policy. Use it unnecessarily, or you’ll lose it by midnight. This is how mobile data works today,” he wrote.
He said unused data should Proceed to the next session.
He mentioned three demands related to it.
The first: “All telecom operators must provide renewal of unused data. What remains unused at the end of the day, must be added to the daily data limit the next day, and not erased once expiration.”
His second request, he wrote, is that if a consumer isn’t using their data adequately over multiple cycles, “there should be a mechanism to adjust or deduct that value” from the following month’s recharge amount.
“Consumers should not repeatedly pay for capacity they do not use,” he wrote.
His third demand is to allow transfer of unused data to relatives and friends: “Unused data should be treated as the digital property of the consumer. Users must be allowed to transfer their unused data to others, from a daily data limit, just like transferring money to others. As we build a digital India, access cannot depend on data disappearing. If you have paid for it, it should continue and remain yours to use.”
He had earlier also spoken out against The recharge cycle is 28 days, which it notes forces consumers to recharge 13 times a year instead of 12 months. He has also argued against cutting off incoming calls and SMS when prepaid recharges expire, stating that they are “arbitrary” and harmful to users, especially those with keyboard-based “non-smart” phones who rely on them for basic services.
