India’s Vodafone Idea continues its longstanding struggle for financial buoyancy with a renewed drive to raise ARPU in a country where this has been chronically low throughout the mobile era. The operator has embarked on an initial two-pronged strategy based on premium pricing of its recently launched 5G service, combined with a push to convert the significant remaining numbers of 2G subscribers to 4G at higher tariffs. As 5G rolls out, the plan is to migrate the 4G base up to that, for which Rs 50,000–55,000 crore ($6-6.6 billion) has been allocated over three years. The operator has adopted the euphemism of tariff correction as an umbrella term for this strategy. This strategy of tilting the subscriber base towards an…