Billionaire Mukesh Ambani founder, chairman, and managing director of Mumbai-based Reliance Industries has made investments in excess of $50 billion to create the largest digital and connectivity ecosystem in India.
Currently, 5G mobile networks begin to expand in India, but about half of the country’s 1.4 billion people remain disconnected from the Internet. Reliance Jio infocomm seeks to address this situation by introducing a web-enabled mobile phone that costs about $12.
This device called Jio Bharat a combination of Jio, the company’s name, which means “to live” in Hindi, and “Bharat,” the word for India in various Indian languages, was launched in July this year, and is a simple mobile phone that has a physical keyboard, a small screen, and a camera.
While the device isn’t 5G-capable, it offers 4G speeds, meaning it can stream music and video via pre-installed apps from Reliance Jio’s services, which include content such as Bollywood films, cricket matches and pop music. The phone can also be used to make digital payments, a practice that has boomed in India in recent years, says Newley Purnell in the Wall Street Journal.
Customers who buy the JioBharat phone pay about $1.50 a month for unlimited voice calls and 14 gigabytes of data.
Reliance Jio is “disrupting the bottom of the pyramid” with the JioBharat phone, J.P. Morgan said in a July research report. “We believe that with this phone Jio can take market share at the lower end of the market.”
Meta, Google and private-equity firms such as General Atlantic and Silver Lake have invested billions in Jio Platforms, owner of Reliance Jio.
Last updated: December 26th, 2025
