Online Recharge Woes with BSNL Portal

BSNL is still the favorite mobile service provider for many Indians because of transparent billing and good network coverage. Anyone who travelled to remote regions of the country would vouch for BSNL’s service. Despite of all these, BSNL losses are ever growing. We at Telecomtalk had conducted a survey in January to find out reader’s opinions about BSNL/MTNL and 53% of the readers were happy with their choice. Out of the several improvements, TT readers felt that BSNL must improve customer support and upgrade their website.

In this post I will try to bring out the issues faced by BSNL customers w.r.t. to online recharges through the issue I faced today. Having been a BSNL customer for over five years and experienced online/offline recharges at multiple portals I think I can do my fair bit here.

Today I wanted to recharge my prepaid number with an STV and headed to Paytm (I always use Paytm and recommend them for prompt service) for the same. As the recharge was reported success but did not happen in reality, nice folks at Paytm refunded the amount immediately. Later I headed to BSNL Portal for the same. Here strange things started happening. After making the necessary payment successfully I was greeted with this database related error message: