New Delhi: Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) Mukesh Ambani on Tuesday said that India has the historic opportunity to become the world’s pre-eminent digital society with ease of living for all.

Ambani, who was speaking at the Indian Mobile Congress, said: “India has the historic opportunity to become the world’s pre-eminent digital society with ease of living for all. My conviction comes from the enormous transformative power of the digital technologies.”

In order to buttress his point, Ambani further said: “As many as 300 million mobile subscribers in India are still trapped in the 2G era. Urgent policy steps are needed to ensure that these underprivileged people have an affordable smartphone so that they too can benefit from the Direct Benefit Transfer into their bank accounts, and actively participate in the digital economy.”

“India is today among the best digitally connected nations in the world. In order to maintain this lead, policy steps are needed to accelerate early rollout of 5G, and to make it affordable and available everywhere,” he said, adding that JIO will pioneer the 5G revolution in India in the second half of 2021.

He said that as the digitalisation of the Indian economy and Indian society picks up speed, the demand for digital hardware will grow enormously. “We cannot rely on large-scale imports in this area of critical national need ... India has developed world-class strengths in chip design. I clearly foresee India becoming a major hub for the state-of-the-art semiconductor industry. When all the stakeholders work together, we can surely ensure that India’s success in hardware will match our success in software,” he added.

“India has already earned a proud place in the annual calendar of global conversations on digital technologies. This is because of India’s two unique strengths, which the world has now fully recognised. One is the confluence of three Ds — India’s vibrant democracy, India’s young demography and India’s digital transformation,” he said.

“Throughout 2020, India worked online, studied online, shopped online, received healthcare online, socialised online, played online…Simply put, India thrived online. This underscores the phenomenal evolution of digital technology in India. From being a means of limited engagement and entertainment, it has evolved into a platform of unlimited enablement and empowerment. Despite the lockdown, the entire industry consisting of thousands of engineers and employees worked round the clock to provide critical support 24 x 7 to all sections of the society and business,” he added.

The RIL CMD reiterated that “India can — and India will — prove cynics wrong by becoming a $5 trillion economy. It will be a more equal India…with increased incomes, increased employment, and improved quality of life for one billion Indians at the middle and bottom of the economic pyramid.” /BI/