Airtel and Asklaila announced a tie-up yesterday to offer local search services across 400 categories in 6 cities of India namely Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Hyderabad.

The alliance plans to offer free call services to the subscriber for dialing retail outlets or other point of local contact under the deal. It is the advertiser who would pay up for the call. The service will be offered in an interactive mode to DTH subscribers while for mobile subscribers, USSD SMS mode will be adopted which has no store and forward capability but response time of it is high.

Airtel says the revenue model is twofold involving revenues from paid listings as well royalty on each lead generated.