Digital infra to increase threefold in 5 years: Telecom Secretary

Stating that the country is at the cusp of the largest digital opportunity in the world, telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan on Friday said there is a need for a three-fold increase in the digital infrastructure over the next five years.

Improving the digital infrastructure will help achieve the goal of trebling GDP to USD 7.5 trillion over the next five years, she said.

"We must aim for a threefold growth in digital infrastructure footprint over the next five years," she told the India Digital Open Summit here.

She affirmed that government will play a facilitating role for making this happen so that the private sector takes the lead in investing.

Without mentioning any vexed issue like the Aadhaar, she said government is working on both data protection as well as data security.

She said the telecom department is currently finalising the new telecom policy and asserted that it will come out in 2018 itself.

Citing the work done by the information technology sector, Sundararajan said we will also have to adopt a liberal approach, embrace open source and an open culture.

She further said the Indian stack, including Aadhaar, is also based on open source. The unserved and the underserved people represent the opportunity which is existing now.

Exhorting all the stakeholders to be highly aspirational for making the changes happen, she said India can emerge as a digital leader at the global level.

Government is "aggressively" working towards introducing the fifth generation telecom networks, she said, adding the reliance on cloud will make open-source very critical.

Speaking at the Reliance Corporate Park, the headquarters of Reliance Jio, Sunadararajan praised the new entrant in the telecom sector that wrecked the sector through its aggressive play, for setting "new benchmarks" on the aspirations front.

She said Jio has "seized" the opportunity available by creating appropriate products and services, and also created thousands of jobs.

Addressing the event, Akash Ambani, who sits on the board of Jio, said his firm has benefitted from using open- source architecture and affirmed thier commitment to the same.

He said the domestic cloud market is currently valued at USD 2.6 billion and will grow to USD 4 billion. The Ambani scion said Jio is aiming for 50 per cent growth annually in emerging technologies like virtual reality.