Mr Chandrashekar, Madam Praveen
Distinguished speakers, dear participants and friends
Good morning, Namaskar,
I am very pleased to be able to join you at this event, and have this opportunity to wish you a happy World Telecommunication and Information Society Day!
I would like to thank my good friend Bharat Bhatia, President of the ITU-APT Foundation of India for his kind invitation, and for organizing this event to celebrate the day.
Let me start by expressing my deepest sympathy with you for the terrible situation you are facing in India as you battle the second wave of COVID. Our hearts are with you at this difficult time and I hope all my friends there are safe and well.
World Telecommunication and Information Society Day is an opportunity, every year since 1969, to celebrate the benefits that the technology can bring to societies and economies.
The day marks the foundation of the ITU on 17 May 1865, and I am sure in all those years there has never been more of a reason to celebrate the day. Where would we have been over the last year without the telephone, without mobile phones, without radio and television broadcasting, without the Internet.
India’s embrace of the technology is helping people keep abreast of health advice, to continue working and studying from home, and keeping in touch with friends and relatives during this pandemic. It is encouraging to see several new ICT innovations being deployed in India to help overcome this crisis.
This year's WTISD theme, "Accelerating digital transformation in challenging times", recognises the critical role of telecommunication/ICTs to the resiliency of societies, and how ITU membership and its partners have stepped up and engaged in activities that have proved essential in saving lives and sustaining economies.
As we know there are still many that are unconnected, especially those living in rural and remote communities – which is a large proportion of the Indian population. Many efforts are being made to bring affordable connection to these people, and these efforts now have a greater urgency than ever before.
The ITU Connect 2030 Agenda, adopted by the ITU membership, aims to close this digital gap. This year our membership is focusing on the key goals and targets related to digital transformation, such as digital strategies, e-government, cybersecurity, emergency communications, innovation and partnership.
ITU’s membership of governments, businesses, academia, civil society and other regional and international organisations, including of course the ITU-APT Foundation of India, need to further strengthen their collaboration and cooperation at this time to reinforce the development of digital strategies and other technology-driven initiatives.
One thing that Covid has clearly shown is that we are all interdependent on each other. As with cybersecurity so with Covid, we are only safe if everyone else is safe. Multilateralism is more important now that every before, and so ITU’s role is now more important than ever before in its long history.
We very much appreciate all the work ITU-APT Foundation of India is doing to help collaboration between ITU and India - its contribution to our studies, and especially its efforts to increase the participation of India in our work, including the academia and SME membership categories.
I am very pleased that we will soon have a new ITU Office opening in Delhi to cover the South Asia region. We hope that this will encourage and enable greater participation from India, and the region, in ITU’s work.
Finally, I would like to invite you to visit our dedicated WTISD webpage on the ITU website (
www.itu.int/en/wtisd) where you can find tools and resources developed by ITU, and the details of our WTISD celebration which starts at 13:00 Geneva time. Today is also the start of the final week of this year’s very successful
WSIS Forum. So I hope you will be able to join us.
Let’s look forward to next year’s celebration, and hope we will be able to celebrate it in person, and give recognition to telecommunication and ICT’s contribution to overcoming Covid!
Thank you and I wish you all keep safe and well!
Dhanyawad.