Union Minister for Communications Jyotiraditya Scindia stated on October 8 that the government has transitioned from being a regulator to a facilitator and must act as a partner with all stakeholders within the telecom ecosystem. He made these remarks during his participation in India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2026 and a visit to the Airtel Arena, where Bharti Enterprises Founder and Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal briefed him on Airtel’s offerings in cloud, data centres, and security.
Scindia highlighted that the success of the telecom sector depends on the combined achievements of network equipment and optical fiber manufacturers, telecom operators, internet service providers, and application and platform companies. He said, “From its earlier role of being a regulator to its new avatar of being a facilitator. We are partners in the ecosystem, whichever vertical you may look at, and success is defined by the combined success of the ecosystem. And therefore, if you look at the telecom space, there are three or four very clear verticals within the value chain. There are the network equipment manufacturers or the OFC manufacturers. There are the telcos and the service providers, the ISPs, the telcos, and so on and so And then there are the value addition, which are the applications and the platforms that run on that infrastructure, such as AI and so on and so forth.”
He emphasized that the government must engage as an equal partner with industry stakeholders, stating, “I think government has to play a role in terms of sitting across the table, and I want to emphasize that a little: not a rectangular table, but a round table, because then the concept of partnership succeeds. And the second thing that I try to do is make sure that the minister does not sit at the head of the table. The minister sits in the middle of the table, and therefore dons that role of a partner.”
Scindia described the enactment of the new Telecommunications Act in 2023 as historic, replacing legislation that dated back to 1885. He said the new act is future-focused rather than reflecting the past and outlined four main pillars of reform. He explained, “First, the architectural framework was completely changed, where earlier licenses used to be broken up into different categories, made it very simple from a regulatory standpoint, made the process very transparent, and put in place a migratory system for current service providers that was very transparent to all.”
The minister also highlighted India’s progress in digital connectivity and telecommunications infrastructure, noting that monthly data usage per user has reached 6 GB, surpassing that of several advanced economies. He stated, “This demonstrates that digital scale need not come at the cost of affordability. However, connectivity alone is not the destination. A network becomes truly meaningful when it expands human capability. India has therefore combined its telecommunications infrastructure with population-scale digital public infrastructure. Aadhaar has empowered 1.4 billion people, while the country’s UPI and digital stack process around 20 billion transactions a month. In the last fiscal year, UPI processed 260 billion transactions worth USD 3.4 trillion. Today, 84 per cent of India’s digital transactions take place on UPI, while an estimated 49 per cent of the world’s digital transactions happen in India, highlighting the scale of the country’s digital transformation.”
He further detailed the expansion of broadband and rural connectivity, stating that over 550 million rural telephone connections now exist, more than 99 per cent of villages have 4G connectivity, and over 516,000 5G base transceiver stations provide 5G services to 99.9 per cent of districts and 86 per cent of the population. Scindia emphasized the dramatic reduction in data costs as instrumental to this transformation, saying, “The cost of 1 GB of data has fallen from roughly Rs 270 about a decade ago to around Rs 8 today, representing an approximately 97 per cent decline. This sharp reduction in data costs has resulted in a dramatic increase in consumption. Monthly data usage per subscriber has risen around 140 times, from 0.26 MB in 2014 to current levels, demonstrating the scale of India’s digital transformation.”