You might've heard how "the virus doesn't discriminate" and affects everyone equally regardless of their gender, cultural belief, wealth, and other socio-economic factors. That's entirely true; why wouldn't it be? But sadly, the coping ability of ones effected are wildly determined by one factor & one factor only, which is money. At a time where companies are coming forward to help the society the best they can, another name has been added to the list – Nepal Telecom (NTC). They've already donated a large sum to the national COVID-19 relief fund and now, NTC is offering "Zero Balance Package". Under this, the eligible group of subscribers will get a certain amount of call-time, data, and SMS for free.

NTC Zero Balance Package: Eligibility

Nepal Telecom has been pretty clever with who gets to enjoy this free package. Primarily, it is limited to prepaid users only, while the postpaid customers will have to make do some other way. And I mean, that's a very logical move. Postpaid users are already the "premium" class of customers and it'd be fairly accurate to assume they have plenty of resources to afford to make calls, send messages, and such. Furthermore, prepaid users make up the majority of the company's customer base.Therefore, prepaid customers qualifying the following criteria will be eligible to receive the zero balance package:

• Have made at least one call during the first week of Nepal's nationwide lockdown, Chaitra 11 – 18, 2076 B.S. (March 24 – 31, 2020)
• The customer must have had less than 33 paisa balance on the mid-night of Baisakh 8, 2077 B.S. (April 19, 2020)

NTC has already sent a message to all customers meeting the above two conditions. Similarly, the recipients of the said message are required to reply to the message within 2 days to get the zero balance package.Also read: E-commerce platforms offering deliveries during the lockdown

What are the contents of the package?

Now let's talk about the contents of the package itself.

• 50-minutes voice call (inside NT network)
• 25 SMS (within NT network)
• 100MB data

[caption id="attachment_79875" align="aligncenter" width="900"] NTC, Ncell Bonus on Recharge[/caption]All these features will be valid for 7 days' period. This is really helpful to so many people but still, the aforementioned criteria impose a sort of a restriction to its accessibility. While Nepal Telecom has "eradicating exploitation" of the offer in mind, that has directly hampered the total number of users that are going to make use of this service.So, such customers are better off using the "Namaste Saapati" instead. Now, this one isn't free like the one above, but it does give you extra balance and features like no call-drop, without any additional charges. To get started, just send "start" to 1477. Talking about taking credits, Ncell has also joined in on the bandwagon by extending the loan amount up to Rs. 80, and that too without any service charge.Moreover, Nepal Telecom is also offering the package for free, and adding to the minimum balance to a certain group of customers to prevent any sort of communication deficiency in such a sensitive time.