Google launched Free SMS on Gmail in India

Google on 10 October 2012 launched free SMS chat service for its Indian users. Now, the Gmail SMS feature is accessible to Indian users along with 51 other countries in Asia, Africa and North America. Google had first made this feature available to its users in some African countries in 2011.
 
With this free Gmail SMS service users can easily send text messages to mobile phones via Gmail Chat. The responses of the SMSs will appear as replies in Gmail Chat and conversations will be stored in users Chat history, like regular chats.
The free Gmail SMS is made available to eight major mobile service operators in India that are Aircel, Idea, Loop Mobile, MTS, Reliance, Tata DoCoMo, Tata indicom and Vodafone.

Initially Google will provide free SMS credit of 50 messages for each user. For every message sent, users credit will decrease by one. However, this credit would increase by five every time a user responds to the text message by sending a return message.

In case, the SMS credit limit slashes down to zero, one credit would increase automatically after 24 hours.
Google had also provided the facility of buying SMS credit in case of shortage by sending a text message to their own phone and then by replying to that message.