India’s largest telecom player Bharti Airtel is investing ₹18,000-₹20,000 crore this year in building hard infrastructure and the industry as a whole is likely to invest anywhere between ₹50,000-₹60,000 crore in 2017-18, according to Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal.
Mooting a collaborative approach between telecom players, including Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio, in areas such as shared telecom towers and fibre networks, Mr. Mittal said on Wednesday that government policies must make it easier for telecom companies to do business in order to expedite the impact of these investments.
Terming data as the ‘new oil’ that India does not need to import, Mr. Ambani, who shared the stage with Mr. Mittal at the maiden India Mobile Congress in the capital, said while the country may have missed out on the last three industrial revolutions, it was well well-poised to take the lead in the fourth one fuelled by data, connectivity and artificial intelligence.
‘Data super abundance’
“We have data in super abundance,” said Mr. Ambani. “It will be a new source of value and will create opportunities and prosperity for India and millions of Indians,” he said, adding he saw India’s economy expanding to $7 trillion in 10 years, from the current level of $2.5 trillion.
“Data is the oxygen of a digital economy. We cannot deprive Indians of this vital life-sustaining resource. We have to provide ubiquitous access to high-speed data at affordable prices,” the Reliance Industries chairman said, predicting that India’s 4G coverage would become larger than 2G coverage in the next 12 months.
“There’s generally an accusation on the Indian industry for the last two or three years that we don’t invest enough,” Mr. Mittal said at the inaugural session of the Congress, where Oil and Skill Development Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha were present. “Partly, I will concede you are right. But the telecom industry in particular is an exception.”
“My own company Airtel has put in about ₹10,000 crore upto September this year on hard infrastructure. This year, we plan to put in ₹18,000-₹20,000 crore investment. Mukesh (Ambani) is putting up a lot of investment and I am sure other telecom players are as well. So nearly ₹50,000-₹60,000 crore is going in this year to build hard digital infrastructure,” he said.
Though the government had eased right of way norms and opened up central government buildings for telecom towers, Mr. Mittal said that getting permissions at the ground level was still a slow process.
“State governments, municipalities and local authorities must understand the power of Digital India and support what we are trying to do, as per the vision of the Prime Minister,” he added.
Admitting that the industry faced challenges, Mr. Mittal said that he was confident that India would be the biggest telecom market in the world with its large population and the PM’s belief in using digital platforms to serve the people.
‘None can do it alone’
“Clearly, as Mukesh pointed out, none of us can do it alone. We all have to come together while we compete alone for the benefit of customers, we have to collaborate among ourselves to create the ecosystem using common fibres, common towers and so on,” he said, adding that India would no longer be behind the curve on the adoption of new telecom technologies such as 5G.
Mr. Ambani also stressed on the need to collaborate and said India provided enough opportunities for “all of us to grow and prosper together.”
“To realise the Digital India dream to the fullest, we have to start by becoming the change that we seek to create…We must break silos and forge partnerships. No corporate, nor the government, can do it alone. Together, we can achieve the unimaginable,” Mr. Ambani said.
Vodafone group CEO Vittorio Colao hinted at the poor financial health of the industry and said that it was essential the telecom sector “is in good health” to realise India’s full potential as a superpower. “Indian consumers have a very strong appetite for data services but still over half a billion people have not connected to the Internet and these are a great opportunity for all,” he said.
