The number of mobile phone users in India is massive. The population in India is about 1.1 billion and many of them have mobile phones. People in India communicate very often with SMS and text messages. Now if Twitter connected their services by allowing people in India to tap their accounts into SMS and text messages, there would be a major increase in use. Twitter just made a deal with Bharti Airtel to make this happen. Bharti Airtel is the largest telecommunications company in India with 100 million subscribers.

Bharti Airtel customers will be allowed to receive SMS tweets for free and send tweets through a text message at the standard rate. The reason why Twitter shut down their SMS service last year in many other countries is because of the charges that telecommunication companies wanted from Twitter. Twitter has been trying to find the middle ground between telecommunication companies from now on.

To get started using Twitter on Airtel, customers need to send a text message saying START to the number 53000. After that Twitter confirms that you are willing to send and receive SMS tweets.