I think Promo Balance will be permitted to use for all other purposes except auto debit recharge. Validity of talktime will remain unlimited.
Airtel is adopting a brave approach, either they can reduce charges to match Jio... Burden up cumulative losses and bleed or charge what is needed to sustain and let the risk of losing some subscribers be taken in the flow. They chose latter and it is practical thing to do, it is better to remain in contention and build up later when things stabilise rather than shut shop bcoz of unbearable burden. They will pose stiff resistance and i am all with them in this hour of crisis.
At present people were doing recharge and later using spare talktime balance to opt for further validity top ups. This meant airtel was still not getting desired revenue, now with above policy there will increase in original recharge frequency as well as people will try to use promo balance for data or other services.
These new terms have been made specifically to scale up usage by subscribers who hardly add productivity to their network. With so much stress on assets this will ease the pressure points. Spectrum is costly and so is running other operations of a mobile network company hence wastage of resources is a costly bet in such a competitive , hyper sensitive market