‘Digital India’ initiative to be US$ 1 Trillion Opportunity

India: Communication and IT minister of India Ravi Shankar Prasad said that ‘Digital India’ will be US$ 1 trillion opportunity; he was addressing the Annual India 2016 conference in Kolkata. The conference was organized by Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School.

The minister further stated that combining the business requirement for Digital India in Telecom, Information Technology, Information Technology enabled services, along with the manufacturing sector creates the huge business opportunity.

To provide the digital services, the government is developing the robust broadband infrastructure which will connect the all gram panchayat across the country through the optical fibre cable network. The key digital services include e-education and e-health.

Further, the recent decision on the telecom policy issues such as spectrum sharing, preference to open source IT software and applications would also support in making the robust infrastructure for digital services.

Ravi Shankar also mentioned that the government is working towards digitization of the postal department. As well, the stepping up of the ‘Business Process Outsourcing’ in rural areas and increasing the role of common service center are designed to drive the Digital India initiative.

A recent report published by TechSci Research “India Optical Fiber Cables Market Forecast and Opportunities, 2020”, depicts that India optical fiber cables (OFC) market is expected to grow robustly due to expansion of telecom infrastructure throughout the country over the next five years. Being the second largest telecom market worldwide, India exhibits high data traffic owing to increasing penetration of smartphones and growing demand for broadband services, thereby creating significant demand for OFC installations. Consumers are increasingly shifting towards internet driven applications like HDTV, video on demand and high-speed file sharing. To address the soaring demand for high speed data transmission, the government of India along with telecom giants is investing substantial capital in upgrading the country’s telecom infrastructure. The existing network of copper cables is being overhauled by using advanced fiber optic technology. All these factors are consequently providing a considerable thrust to the OFC market in India.