Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha has stated that the Indian telecom industry is seeing a paradigm shift from a voice centric market to a data-centric market and it is expected to cross Rs 6.6 trillion revenue mark by 2020.
He further disclosed that mobile data traffic has grown significantly by 76 percent in India in 2016. This however, has been primarily attributed to the increased smartphone penetration and growing use of smartphones, especially in urban areas. This has therefore increased the usage of internet on hand-held devices in 2016. He said that 559 megabytes of mobile data was generated per month by an average smart phone, up from 430 megabytes per month in 2015.
Likewise, consumption of video content is also forecasted to reach 75 percent of India’s mobile data traffic by 2021, compared to 49 percent in 2016.The Minister also pointed out that Indian Government had launched the ‘Digital India’ initiative in July 2015 which had three broad targets – providing Digital Infrastructure as a core utility to every citizen, Governance, and Services on Demand as well as Digital empowerment of citizens.
Sinha further pointed out that the projects under the ‘Digital India’ initiative was ‘BharatNet’, launched to deploy high-speed optical fiber cables to connect 2.5 lakh Gram Panchayat across the country by 2018. This project would also help in increasing the fiberized sites in India which currently stands at less than 20 percent as compared to other developed countries. The project is being implemented in Phases, with more than 100,000 gram panchayats connected under Phase-I as of July2017 and states like Kerala, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh neared 100 percent completion.
By Baishakhi Dutta
