Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that 5G technology will contribute $450 billion to India’s economy in the next decade and a half. He also said that India should be ready to launch 6G services in the next ten years, for which a task force has already started its work.
Speaking at a programme marking the 25 years of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Tuesday, PM Modi said, “5G will contribute $450 billion to the Indian economy. Not just the speed of the Internet, 5G will also increase the speed of economic development and employment generation. By the end of this decade, we should be able to launch 6G services, and our task force has started working on it”.
Modi also said that whereas the 2G era was marked by “corruption and policy paralysis”, the country has moved “transparently” to 4G and now 5G. He added that mobile manufacturing units in India have expanded from 2 to over 200 and that the country is “today the world’s biggest mobile manufacturing hub.”
PM Modi also launched an indigenous 5G test bed developed as a multi-institute collaborative project by a total of eight institutes led by IIT Madras. The test bed can be used by the telecom industry, start-up During this address, the Prime Minister also said that every village in the country is being connected with optical fibre. While noting that before 2014, “not even 100 village panchayats in India were provided with optical fibre connectivity,” the Prime Minister said, “Today we have made broadband connectivity reach about 1.75 lakh gram panchayats. Hundreds of government services are reaching the villages because of this.”
During the video conference, wherein he released a postal stamp commemorating TRAI’s silver jubilee celebrations, the PM noted that India was the ‘fastest in the world in terms of teledensity and internet users’.
“In the last 8 years, we have infused a new energy into the telecom sector with the ‘Panchamrita’ of Reach, Reform, Regulate, Respond and Revolutionise. TRAI has played a very important role in this,” he said at the occasion.s and researchers, to validate their prototypes in 5G.