Bharti Airtel Limited has disclosed additional penalties from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), bringing the total financial impact to ₹11.25 lakh following notices from Assam and Maharashtra circles. This follows earlier disclosures regarding Delhi and Karnataka.

The latest notice, issued by the DoT Assam LSA on September 30, 2026, imposes a penalty of ₹7.36 lakh. This action stems from a Customer Application Form (CAF) audit for the quarter ending June 2026, which alleged violations of subscriber verification norms under the License Agreement. Unlike previous instances, Bharti Airtel stated it does not agree with the notice and will take appropriate actions for rectification or reversal.

A second notice from the DoT Maharashtra LSA, also received on September 30, 2026, imposed a penalty of ₹1.27 lakh. This resulted from a CAF audit conducted for July 2026, alleging similar violations of subscriber verification norms. The company opted to pay this penalty without contesting it.

Regulatory Compliance Context

Under the License Agreement, telecom operators are required to ensure adequate verification of customers before enrolling them as subscribers. The DoT conducts periodic CAF audits to verify compliance with these instructions. The penalties were disclosed under Regulation 30 of the SEBI (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations, 2015.

What the Numbers Show

The combined penalty of ₹11.25 lakh remains immaterial relative to the company's scale, with the maximum financial implication limited to the levied amounts. However, the divergence in response strategy is notable: Bharti Airtel chose to contest the largest single penalty (Assam, ₹7.36 lakh) while paying smaller penalties in Delhi, Karnataka, and Maharashtra without dispute. This suggests a selective approach to regulatory disputes, potentially based on the specific nature of the alleged violations or the cost-benefit analysis of legal recourse versus immediate payment.

Bharti Airtel was the subject of a block trade on BSE, with approximately 300,002 shares changing hands at ₹1763.00 per share, aggregating to a total transaction value of ₹52.89 crore.

Block trade details

The transaction was recorded on the BSE platform. The following table summarises the key parameters of the block deal:

Block trades of this nature typically involve large institutional or high-volume participants executing sizeable orders in a single transaction outside the regular order book, though the identity of the counterparties has not been disclosed in the available data.