IT and telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Tuesday said the much-awaited trials for 5G technologies will commence soon, a step that will speed up implementation and fuel the expansion of services like e-payments, e-commerce, e-learning, driverless cars and robotic surgery to name a few.
Emphasising on the government’s focus to become a global hub for electronic manufacturing, the minister said the aim is to produce 1 billion mobile phones, 50 million smart TVs and 50 million products like laptops and tablets in the next five years.
“We have tried to leverage India’s digital ecosystem to reflect upon governance in all the sectors. 4G is working here and for 5G, we are going to start trials very soon,” Prasad said at an event organised by Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) and industry body, CII.
“We are pushing electronic manufacturing in a big way. India must become a good centre of manufacturing as a part of the global supply chain. That is our focus. In the coming five years, India is determined to start producing annually 1 billion mobile phones, 50 million TV sets and 50 million IT hardware devices like laptops and tablets. That is our vision in electronic manufacturing. We want to scale big our digital economy in the coming five years to create a $1-trillion digital economy,” he said.
Earlier during the event, telecom secretary Anshu Prakash said the country witnessed “massive growth” in the past 5-6 years in terms of expansion, penetration and use of mobile technologies.
On the government’s future endeavours, he said “We are soon coming out with production linked incentive (PLI) scheme for telecom products for which about `12,000 crore is earmarked. We want to unleash the potential of spectrum, remove bottlenecks, explore what new can be done with spectrum. We want to encourage wireline, internet base line, FTTH and FTTX connections. In the realm of 5G, we want to come out with meaningful applications”.
Emphasising that the government wants to encourage manufacturing of telecom equipment in the country, Prakash pointed out “what is important in the PLI scheme on telecom is that we want more value addition, generate more IPRs, etc”.
