India Mobile World Congress 2019 - India Telecom

India Mobile World Congress 2019 - India Telecom

15 October 2019 - New Delhi, India

Good morning! It is a great pleasure to be here, and I thank the Department of Telecommunications for the kind invitation to address you today at India Telecom 2019. 

India enjoy a tremendous diversity of people, cultures and ideas. Yet we are living through a time of accelerating globalization. Technologies are converging. Industries are converging. And our world is becoming increasingly connected. So much so that now more than half of the world’s population is now using the Internet. ICTs permeate all walks of life, economies and industries.

In a region that is fast emerging as a hub for technology innovation, India in particular is a technology powerhouse. As a leading force in today’s digital economy - and with its efforts to use next-generation networks like 5G to expand mobile and broadband connectivity – paradigm shifts are taking place across society, industry and economy in India, in keeping with rapid technological developments such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cloud computing and Internet of Things.

As is often the case, it is not one technology, but a meeting of technologies, that will create a revolution.

These technologies are now enabling innovations in healthcare, financial services, energy, transport, education and smart cities and communities. They will be essential for the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals - all 17 SDGs - and Artificial Intelligence will influence almost all aspects of societies and economies.

We are seeing extraordinary advances at the intersection of various fields of innovation. Industries are entering new shared space. They are becoming competitors as well as collaborators. And they need common technical standards more than ever to ensure openness and interoperability, to reduce costs through economies of scale, and to avoid getting locked into propriety standards.

ITU’s membership is growing and becoming much more diverse as a result. And ITU needs to work with many different sectors and organizations with which it has no historical ties. Collaboration, coordination and cooperation are key words. We need to bring our own specific competencies to the table, pool our resources and avoid duplication of effort.

For instance, at ITU’s annual Telecom World which this year was held in Budapest, Hungary from 9 to 12 September, governments, corporates and tech small and medium enterprises (SMEs) came together to exhibit innovative solutions, network, share knowledge and participate in debates with experts. It is part of ITU’s outreach to innovators and start-ups which includes the creation of a new category of ITU membership for SMEs at a much lower membership fee. Given the burgeoning SME sector in India today, we warmly welcome your active participation at ITU. We have also started providing remote access to many of our meetings so that members can actively participate without the cost of travel and accommodation.

Another important area of ITU’s work this year will be the international standardization of 5G. The World Radiocommunication Conference in Egypt will decide on the additional spectrum for 5G in the frequency range between 24 GHz and 86 GHz. 5G will change things radically. It will give access to highly reliable, high capacity, low latency communications, where trusted ICTs will be central to innovation in every industry sector. It will turn connectivity into a platform benefiting people, things and industries. And expectations for 5G are high. Research suggests that 5G could unlock worldwide over $12 trillion of new revenue and 22 million jobs.

Building radiocommunication networks is expensive. Countries and companies need to ensure that their investments are protected, both through international standards and globally harmonized radio-frequency spectrum management. And that is why cross-industry and public-private sector collaboration on these important issues is so critical, including and especially in areas that may be less attractive for operators.

This is particularly true in a country like India, which has the largest rural population in the world. At ITU, we see enormous potential in the upcoming establishment of the ITU South Asian Area Office and Technology Innovation Centre right here in New Delhi. This centre will serve as a catalyst for connecting innovators with public and private-sector decision-makers in key areas like 5G and the other technologies on the agenda of WRC-19.

Today, software is driving a revolution in networking, enabling the creation of virtual network ‘slices’ able to meet the specific needs of any particular ICT application. With software doing jobs traditionally done by highly specialized hardware, infrastructure is becoming more affordable and networks more flexible, resulting in some very promising ICT applications.

Let us look at a few examples.

Your smartphone camera is now able to capture and transmit images and video of the quality necessary to guide medical interventions. The value of Artificial Intelligence in analyzing this unstructured data contributes to the considerable optimism we see surrounding AI in health.

With the help of Artificial Intelligence, low-tech solutions are achieving better predictions than our best human specialists. We can now imagine this kind of analysis being done at home in the future.

This is why ITU and WHO joined forces last year to launch a new initiative to leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence for health. A new ITU Focus Group called “AI for Health” is open to all stakeholders bringing together researchers, engineers, practitioners, entrepreneurs and policy makers to develop international standards that will save lives.

We have seen similar remarkable breakthroughs in digital financial services.
After the first edition held in India in 2017, the second symposium of the “Financial Inclusion Global Initiative” was held in Cairo earlier this year. The FIGI initiative was established by ITU, the World Bank Group, and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It brings together all stakeholders, including the regulators from the telecom sector and those from the financial sector, to develop policies and interoperable standards to accelerate digital financial inclusion. The next FIGI Symposium is planned for 2-5 June 2020 in Brazil.

The list of new ICT applications built on convergence goes on and on…

However, meaningful digital inclusion can only be achieved if and when everyone feels empowered to use these technologies. And that’s why skill development is so critical to bridging the digital divide.

Currently, India has its largest ever adolescent and youth population. And the country will continue to have one of the youngest populations in the world until 2030, the target year for achieving the SDGs.

This youth bulge is both an opportunity and a test for India. It’s an opportunity because India is home to a large highly educated population of some 250 million people speaking fluent English, with world-class engineering talent. The CEOs of tech giants and ITU Members like Google and Microsoft were born and educated in India. But this is also a test in part because youth are three times as likely as adults to be unemployed. The global youth employment crisis is one of the biggest development challenges faced by young people all over the world and in particular in emerging economies.

In response, the International Labour Organization (ILO), ITU and 20 other sister UN agencies have joined forces to launch the Global Initiative on Decent Jobs for Youth, the first-ever, comprehensive United Nations system-wide effort for the promotion of youth employment worldwide. ITU and ILO are leading the Digital Skills for Decent Jobs Campaign whose goal is to equip 5 million young men and women with job-ready, transferable digital skills by 2030 in support of the SDGs. And we invite India to join this campaign.

As part of our commitment, ITU has developed a Digital Skills Toolkit to help stakeholders build their own national digital skills strategies. It is intended for policy makers and partners in the private sector, NGOs and academia. The toolkit highlights India’s Future Skills platform, which was launched last February to upskill 2 million technology professionals and 2 million other future employees and students over the next few years. This platform will make talent available for India and the Indian industry to embrace opportunities from emerging technologies ranging from AI to the internet of things to cloud computing to virtual reality.

The data generated by citizens’ mobile phones and Internet of Things will help governments improve environmental sustainability, increase disaster preparedness and response, and deliver better public services.

ICT platforms provide the basis for these and many more such applications which will create significant improvements in the quality of life enjoyed by millions of people worldwide.

To conclude, ITU is very grateful for the excellent collaboration with India over so many years and we look forward to discussing how we can further strengthen this cooperation to ensure that new technologies help generate digital dividends for everyone everywhere, whether they live a vast city like New Delhi or a remote village far away. This technology can benefit everyone, to have a healthier more productive and enjoyable life, providing of course they have the connection and are empowered to use it!

I wish you a very productive discussion, and once gain thank you for the invitation.