Scindia pitches India as global base for innovation and production

Telecom Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia says the convergence of connectivity, digital public infrastructure and AI can drive economic empowerment and global-scale capabilities

Telecom Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia pegged India as a destination for the world for manufacturing, innovation, security and scale, and for producing for the world, with India having created several milestones in connectivity, digital public infrastructure (DPI) through UPI and now artificial intelligence (AI).

 

“We have established ourselves as a builder of platforms, and therefore our calling today must be: innovate in India, build in India, secure in India, scale in India, and serve the world from India,” he said in his keynote address on the third day of the KEC on Monday.

 

The next leap should be about connecting intelligence with opportunity, where the India AI Mission, with 38,000 GPUs, comes in, building national AI capability, which, along with telecom connectivity, DPI and AI, can transform economic empowerment throughout the country.

  

“When you take this compute power and converge it with the telecom network and with financial DPI and AI, then you can truly transform economic empowerment through the length and breadth of our country,” he said, while equally cautioning against intelligent fraud and advocating the need for predictive trust versus just reactive security.

 

“Compromised identities can cross platforms, and today AI-generated voices can simulate human voices, and therefore tomorrow's infrastructure must house intelligent architecture to be able to defend itself,” he added.

 

While Digital India created infrastructure for all Indians, Scindia pegged 'Intelligent India' as the next frontier where intelligence is democratised.

 

“AI cannot remain the purview of large banks, big corporates, a few, but it must empower the smallest merchant, every single artisan, every single person across the length and breadth of our country, and that is what we hope to achieve with the convergence of a billion people on 5G, 650,000 villages connected with 100 Mbps connection on BharatNet, 1.35 billion Aadhaar cards, UPI doing $3.4 trillion in terms of transactions, the India AI trusted digital infrastructure, and therefore making sure that we protect our citizens while we take them forward,” he said.

 

He added that India had the opportunity to shape the systems of tomorrow with Digital India, where data was becoming the fuel of the AI economy, the same way mobile connectivity democratised fintech, banking and much more, becoming digital highways. “These factors are now composing the new digital trinity. The Trinity of connectivity, the Trinity of compute, and the Trinity of trust,” he said, adding that India’s 5G connectivity network, rolled out the fastest globally, could lay the foundation for AI-powered capability at a global scale. He noted that India could have 1 billion customers on 5G by 2030, from 500 million today.

 

Among the milestones India had accomplished, the minister said India had entered the telecom equipment manufacturing club after 50 years, on the back of making its own India 4G stack that was being executed by public sector carrier Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) with 100,000 towers. “We will be proceeding on 5G very, very soon,” he added.

 

He added that UPI had also created another set of records. In FY25-26, UPI conducted 21,500 crore transactions, with $3.4 trillion transacted on a single platform. “That platform has become ubiquitous across India. But again, we will not stop here. That platform has now become ubiquitous across 11 countries,” he said.