Bharti Enterprises Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal, on Tuesday, said that the telecom sector is still highly taxed, and the government needs to work out to help lessen the burden on the telcos.

“It [telecom sector] is still heavily taxed sector, and that is where the government needs to focus on. If it is indeed the fundamental platform for India to deliver to its masses — all the goodies that government needs to give to society — I think we need to be better taken care of,” said Mittal here at the Global Technology Summit organised by Carnegie India.

He said the telecom sector is a very capital-intensive industry and requires billions of dollars to set up the infrastructure and, therefore, it is required to have a better tax regime to have a robust, sustainable, infrastructure providers in the country.

“Sometimes you feel you are on a treadmill, you just keep on running; I mean there is really no pause. You move from one technology to the other...by the time we rolled out 3G, it was obsolete, and we had quickly move to 4G and as we have put out billions of dollars in 4G, including the spectrum; we have 5G upon us...and, we all know that the talks of 6G has started now...there is really no respite here,” said Mittal.

He said India is probably going to have the fastest and widest rollout of 5G anywhere in the world. “So, all I wish government keeps looking at this structure, infrastructure in a more benign way and one area I keep on raising my voice is that it is still a heavily taxed sector,” he noted.

Mittal said India can now use its soft power as it is much stronger and many countries in the world are wanting to get the same technology at a cheaper rate.

“India has its oil now, the new-found oil which is our digital stack, which is our new-found enthusiasm of young entrepreneurs, the start-up culture, the massive amount of work which is done on digital identity, the JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile) trinity that the Prime Minister has titled it, is a very powerful tool,” Mittal added.

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