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The country’s largest telecom services provider, Bharti Airtel, has said it will invest around ₹20,000 crore this year for expanding its network and digital infrastructure.
This will be part of the Project Leap that the company had announced in November 2015.
As part of the initiative, Airtel had committed ₹60,000 crore to be invested over three years, during which it aimed to transform the network infrastructure to improve network quality and deliver better customer experience.
“Airtel would have put in ₹10,000 crore by September in infrastructure, and we are investing another ₹18,000-20,000 crore on infrastructure this year,” said Bharti Enterprises Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal at the India Mobile Congress here on Wednesday.
He said not only Airtel, but all telecom companies are investing in developing future technologies and setting up infrastructure. The industry overall will be injecting ₹50,000-60,000 crore to build digital infrastructure, he added.
Mittal said India will emerge as a leading telecom industry in the future and a lot of infrastructure — in terms of common towers/fibres, submarine cables and satellite technology — are in the works.
“India’s time has come...each large tech honcho is looking at India,” he said, terming the country an emerging showcase for the digital technology.
Airtel is rolling out massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology and India will be “in step and head to head with what is happening globally”.
Technology framework He said the technology of the future will involve autonomous cars, flying cars, artificial intelligence-based doctors and bots, and hoped that the coming generations will reap the benefits of the technology framework being laid out today.
He added that while the industry gets a lot of support from the Central government, the companies are not getting much backing from the State governments and local authorities when it comes to setting up of infrastructure.
Mittal, therefore, sought the government’s support in fast-tracking the pace of growth and achieving India’s vision, and urged States as well as local governments to recognise the power of digital India and enable easy on-ground implementation of policies such as Right of Way.
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