India will roll out its own 4G and 5G telecom technology stack this year across the country and offer it to the world in 2024, Union Minister of Communications and Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw has said.
“Our private and public partnership approach has given us a solution where the core was developed by the public sector, public fund; and everything else sitting on it comes from the private partners. In this entire 2023, we will be rolling it out on about 50,000 to 70,000, towers, sites and then in 2024 will be offering it to the world,” Vaishnaw said at the B20 India Inception Meeting organised by CII on Monday.
India stack is a set of open Application Programming Interface (API) and public digital goods. Vaishnaw said together they can create robust digital solutions which will solve population scale problems.
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“Prime Minister Narendra Modi has authorised us to say, that this India Stack is today offered to the entire world as India’s contribution in the spirit of public service,” he said.
On the need to strengthen the digital economy, Vaishnaw said that while protection of data was good, it also acted as a pushback against innovation. “We needed a template for individual rights and good for society but also that pushes innovation. It is a difficult balance,” the Minister said adding that the draft Digital Data Protection Bill tried to reach the balance and had met with appreciation at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
(Travel to Gandhinagar for the reporter was sponsored by CII)