With the situation in cities affected by the hate campaign against the people from Northeast getting back to normal, the government on Thursday increased the number of SMSes to 20 per day with immediate effect.

It has been decided to revise the permissible limit of "bulk SMS/MMS to 20 in place of five with immediate effect", said a notification issued by the Ministry of Communication.

"The other conditions will remain the same," it added. It means mobile phone users can send a maximum 20 SMSes in one day. As far as MMSes are concerned, users can send only up to 20 KB of data in one go during the ban period.

The distorted messages and images in the past few days have led to the tension and panic in some of the cities in south India especially Bangalore. This has resulted in the mass exodus of the people of Northeast from these cities.

Keeping in view the situation the government on Friday had imposed a ban on bulk SMSes and MMSes for 15 days restricting them to five.

Industry lobby COAI , the limit of five SMSes per day may cause a loss of up to 8 percent to them.