Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday told telecom industry leaders that all stakeholders need to work together to ensure timely roll-out of 5G technology as well as make India a global hub for telecom equipment, design, development and manufacturing.
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“The future holds great potential with the rapid technology progress. We need to work together to ensure a timely rollout of 5G to leapfrog into the future and empower millions of Indians,” the Prime Minister said.
He added that India was also embarking on a plan to ensure that over the next three years every village would have high speed fibre-optic connectivity and that Andaman and Nicobar Islands had already been linked up with fibre optic cable.
Speaking at the inauguration of India Mobile Congress 2020, Mr. Modi also noted that due to technological upgradation, there was a culture of replacing handsets and gadgets frequently, and asked the industry to look at forming a task-force to think of better ways of handling the electronic waste.
“Even as we experience the rapid speed at which connectivity is improving, we also know that the acceleration has just begun...it is important to think and plan how do we improve lives with the upcoming technology revolution. Better healthcare, better education, better information and opportunities for our farmers, better market access for small businesses are some of the goals we can work towards,” the Prime Minister said.
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He added “we are in the era where mobile apps that are a few years old are surpassing the value of companies that have been present for decades, which is a good sign for young innovators in India”.
“A lot of young techies tell me that it is the code which makes a product special. Some entrepreneurs tell me that it is the concept which matters more. Investors suggest that it is capital which is important to scale a product. But often, what matters the most is the conviction the youngsters have on their product. Sometimes conviction is all that stands between just a profitable exit and making of a unicorn.”
Noting that India had over a billion phone users and over 750 million internet users, the Prime Minister said that half of the total internet users in India were added in the last four years and half of the total internet users were in rural areas. “Our digital size and our digital appetite are unprecedented. We are a country where the tariffs are the lowest in the world. We are one of the fastest growing mobile app markets in the world,” he said.
He added that it was with the help of mobile technology that India would embark on one of the world’s largest COVID-19 vaccination drive.
