Scindia meets top telecom chiefs, discusses 5G roll-out
Industry leaders briefed the minister about the progress of the 5G roll-out in the country, the challenges faced by telcos and possible strategies to enhance service delivery
Union minister for communications and development of north eastern region Jyotiraditya Scindia on Tuesday met the founder and chairperson of Bharti Enterprises Sunil Bharti Mittal, Reliance Jio chairperson Akash Ambani, Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal and Vodafone Idea CEO Akshaya Moondra as he took a meeting of the Stakeholder Advisory Committee (SAC) of telecom service providers.
During the meeting, the industry leaders briefed the minister about the progress of the 5G roll-out in the country, the challenges faced by telcos and possible strategies to enhance service delivery.
“Had a very productive meeting with the Advisory Committee of Telecommunication Service Providers. Discussed upon different aspects concerning the sector including futuristic & innovative areas of growth. We are committed to work together to build an ‘Inclusive and Connected Bharat’,” Scindia tweeted after the meeting.
Scindia also met members of two other SACs — internet service providers and infrastructure providers, and academics and research and development in telecom sector — on Tuesday. The former focused on the need to improve broadband penetration and infrastructure development while the latter focussed on how industry-academia partnerships led to greater innovation and development of a skilled workforce in the telecom sector.
On Monday, Scindia had met members of the other three SACs — on telecom sector original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), on telecom electronics ecosystem and on the satellite communication ecosystem. These six committees are meant to give insights to the department of telecommunications.
All these meetings were introductory and were meant to set the agenda; no policy decisions were taken, two people aware of the matter said on the condition of anonymity.
“These SACs were set up to discuss issues — such as spectrum-related concerns, licence fee, BharatNet, and increasing manufacturing, intellectual property and research and development in the country — raised by different stakeholders at different points of time. The idea is for the stakeholders to get back to the DoT (department of telecom) with their recommendations after six to eight weeks,” the first of the people cited above said.
“Next meeting onwards, there will be discussion. The SACs have to list the issues being faced by the industry and share the presentation with the DoT. The dates for the next meetings will be decided on the basis of that,” the second person cited above said.
The meetings were also attended by the minister of state for communications Dr Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani, DoT secretary Neeraj Mittal, DoT member (technology) Madhu Arora, and DoT member (finance) Manish Sinha.