India on Monday offered secure ICT products to ASEAN countries at competitive costs and also renewed its pledge to share “know how” and “know why” and its willingness to provide long-term financing for buying Indian telecom products and services.
Inaugurating the India Telecom-2017 here, Minister of Communications Manoj Sinha said Indian Telecom companies are willing to share technologies and enter into joint production ventures to develop the entire telecom eco-system in any host country.
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At the event organised to commemorate the 25th year of the ASEAN-India relations, the minister urged the participating countries to ensure that Indian telecom products and services become their number one choice as they accelerate digital connectivity initiatives.
Sinha said at the 13th ASEAN-India Summit in November 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had committed a Line of Credit of US $1 billion to promote projects that support physical and digital connectivity between India and ASEAN. The minister said both the sides have complementary skills, huge markets and capacity to develop new technology and products to serve the people.
He said the Indian communications industry has made great progress over the last decade and with an overall tele-density of 88 and rural tele-density of 53, India has the second largest telecommunications network in the world. Referring to India having one of the lowest mobile tariffs in the world, Sinha said India has already overtaken the US to become the world’s second largest Internet market, with more than 220 million broadband subscribers and more than 450 million users, only behind China.
In his address, Telecom Secretary J S Deepak said the potential of partnership between India and ASEAN is indeed huge and specific areas like GSM, broadband, e-education, tele-medicine, disaster management and capacity building can be explored in a win-win fashion.
