New Delhi [India], October 5 (ANI): India’s 5G network now covers 86 per cent of the population, with close to 500 million customers using 5G, and the government is targeting 1 billion 5G customers by 2030, Union Minister for Communications Jyotiraditya Scindia said on Monday.
Addressing the Kautilya Economic Conclave in Delhi, Scindia said India had witnessed a rapid expansion of telecom connectivity, with 5G now reaching 99.9 per cent of the country’s districts.
“Today 99.9 per cent of our districts are connected by 5G. 86 per cent of our population,” Scindia said.
He said nearly 500 million customers are already using 5G, describing the rollout as the fastest 5G expansion in the world.
“Close to 500 million customers on 5G alone in a period of two years, the fastest 5G rollout in the world,” Scindia said.
The Minister said the government does not plan to stop at the current level of adoption and has set a target of doubling the number of 5G customers to 1 billion by 2030.
“It is our target that by 2030 we must have a billion customers from 500 million today on 5G,” he said.
Scindia said the expansion of 5G is important not only for telecom services but also for the wider digital economy, as the network can connect machines, intelligence and transactions.
He described telecom connectivity, computing and trust as the key elements of a new digital infrastructure.
“The mobile phone has become the new bank branch. The telecom connectivity network today has become the digital highway, and data today has become the fuel of the AI economy,” Scindia said.
He also highlighted the scale of India’s overall connectivity growth. Broadband connections have increased from 60 million people in 2014 to over 1 billion, while internet connectivity has grown from 250 million people to close to 1.2 billion. India now has 1.35 billion mobile subscribers, he said.
According to Scindia, this connectivity is also supporting the expansion of digital financial services. UPI, which started with 21 banks and 90,000 transactions per month, now has more than 740 banks live on the platform.
In FY 25-26, UPI conducted 21,500 crore transactions, with 20 billion transactions per month, 260 billion in a year and USD 3.4 trillion transacted on the platform, he said.
Scindia said the next phase of digital development would involve combining telecom networks with computing and AI capabilities.
The India AI Mission, he said, has a corpus of close to Rs 10,000 crore and is putting together 38,000 GPUs, 14 cloud partners, 7 and a half thousand data sets and 250-plus AI models.
He said the combination of 5G connectivity, computing and digital financial infrastructure could help expand access to digital opportunities across the country.
Scindia also stressed the need for stronger digital security as connectivity and digital transactions expand, saying India needs to move from detecting fraud after it happens to anticipating risks before money moves. (ANI)
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