Saturday, December 25, 2021

Lessons from Digital India

Very recommendable! An amazing success story!

India, a sleeping giant awakens! India is catching up rapidly! What is truly amazing is how many Indian female professionals are involved and excelling in this digital technology and IT progress.

"Over the past five years, India has experienced an unusually rapid expansion of digital connectivity and access to services. This has had a positive impact on the inclusiveness of economic growth; on efficiency and productivity in retail, supply chains, and finance; and on entrepreneurial activity.
India’s engagement with digital technology dates to the late 1980s. Major investments in computer science and education were made under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s administration (1984-89). And with the expansion of internet access in the 1990s, India became home to many major outsourcing companies in IT administration, business processes, and customer service. ...
Then, in 2010, when much of the country’s existing service offerings were still in 2G and 3G, IBSL, a small telecoms company, purchased spectrum in an auction that included rights to much faster 4G frequency bands. IBSL was then acquired by billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s energy conglomerate, Reliance Industries, which thus gained the 4G spectrum rights.
Over the next five years, the resulting new subsidiary, Reliance Jio, invested heavily in building the fiber-optic infrastructure to support broadband access and a national mobile-internet system. During this period, Reliance Jio was granted the right to use the same spectrum for voice services, in addition to data, allowing it to introduce highly affordable smartphones with extremely low-cost data plans. Reliance Jio mobile phones and voice and data services were launched in 2016.
The result was explosive growth in the number of Jio subscribers (which reached 400 million in 2020) and smartphone users across the country. Data costs in India went from being among the highest in the world to the lowest – from roughly $3.50 per gigabyte before Jio to less than $0.30 cents per GB after its entry and expansion. ..."

Lessons from Digital India by Michael Spence - Project Syndicate Over the past five years, India’s mobile-internet and digital-services ecosystem has grown rapidly, owing to the pioneering efforts of large private-sector players. Although this industry-led growth is somewhat unusual, it offers a model that could benefit other developing countries.

No comments: