According to PD Vaghela, chairman, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), increasing research and development (R&D) investment to expand technology development capabilities and leveraging Indian IT industry’s prowess to serve requirements of Indian and global telecom players can help in moving towards Aatmanirbhar Bharat.
In this regard, Vaghela outlined some steps that can be taken to make speedy progress and to make India self-reliant in the telecom space.
According to him, to be self-reliant in the technology space, which is critical for economic and statistical perspective, the country needs to transform from consumer to producer of technology. To upgrade and expand technology development capabilities, investments need to be made in the complete ecosystem, including research, innovation, standardisation, product development, testing and certification. This requires a complete overhaul of the existing practices and policies and industry-academia linkages need to be established, he added.
Further, the chairman said that the commercial research innovations standardisation and product development need to be incentivised. Such innovation can also focus on meeting developing countries’ requirement in the most effective manner and this will open vast market for such products for India. There is a need to push indigenous telecom products in the country amid the booming growth in mobile and fixedline broadband as well as the rise of Industry 4.0 and digital automation, he added
Meanwhile, speaking on rising data demand, Vaghela said that the role of data centres attains equal importance towards becoming self-reliant in the digital space.
