India Mobile World Congress 2019 - Inauguration Ceremony

India Mobile World Congress 2019 - Inauguration Ceremony 

14 October 2019 - New Delhi, India

Excellency Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Communications
Shri. Anshu Prakash, Secretary, Ministry of Communications
Mr. Rajan Mathews, Director General of COAI
Distinguished members of the dias
Distinguished friends, colleagues and friends

Good morning, namaste.
First of all, let me thank you for your kind invitation to be here this week and congratulations on the growth of India Mobile Congress. I look forward to participating in a number of sessions and visiting the exhibition, especially the startup hall.

It is always a pleasure for me to come back to India, a country I have enjoyed visiting over many years, and where I have so many friends!
India has been a Member State of ITU for over 150 years, and now has an ITU membership of some 30 sector members and 16 academia members. 

We very much look forward to furthering this partnership and increasing the Indian membership through three significant developments next year:

• Firstly, we are very grateful to the Indian government to host a new ITU area office for South Asia here in Delhi. It will be opening early next year as well as a new ITU Technology Innovation Centre.
• Secondly, as from January next year ITU will be introducing a new category of membership for Small and Medium Enterprises at a much reduce membership fee. We are also now providing remote participation to many of our meetings to avoid travel costs.
• And Thirdly, the Indian government is kindly hosting the ITU’s World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA) in Hyderabad from 17-27 November next year, preceded by the Global Standards Symposium on 16 November. WTSA is held every four years and sets the direction of ITU’s standardization efforts on the many new and emerging technologies that will serve as the backbone of the fourth industrial revolution.

With these developments and the Indian government’s many campaigns such as Digital India, Make in India, Start-up India and others, together with the Prime Minister’s strong support for the sector and the large workforce of young highly educated people with excellent English, India is uniquely placed to take a leading role in the technology revolution.

ITU of course is the leading UN agency for this technology. It maintains the only international treaty on the use of the radio spectrum, develops international standards to ensure interoperability and promotes the enabling environment to encourage investment. We have 193 Member States and over 900 sector members and some 160 universities as members.

Participation in ITU can be of great benefit. For example through the participation of Indian start-ups in ITU they can forge partnerships with all the big telecom and Internet players that are ITU members, and they can also benefit from our IPR policy which allows patented technology to be included in ITU standards, providing the holder commits to offering licences on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. This is proving extremely beneficial financially to many companies.

ITU is committed to connecting everyone. Most of the unconnected live in the rural areas where the return on investment is much poorer than the urban areas. This is the greatest challenge we are facing. Only if everyone, everywhere has access to affordable broadband will the Sustainable Development Goals be met. Bringing connectivity to the rural areas means people in the villages can benefit from better healthcare, education, and improved productivity. It will help reduce or even hopefully even reverse the move into cities which is creating so may problems. ITU will help India in its efforts to bring connectivity to its huge rural population.

Let me conclude by reiterating our gratitude to the Indian government for its strong support to ITU and our commitment to help India achieve all its ambitious goals to bring the benefits of this technology to the country and its people.

Thank You.